Sep 27 2021

Iron Widow (Iron Widow #1) by Xiran Jay Zhao

Yooooo. I love any book with an unapologetically, righteously angry female lead and this one did not disappoint! Also, Zetian is a disabled heroine who kicks ass! I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with such positive disability rep, which is partly on me but, let’s face it, mostly on publishing. Add to that the Asian aspect and I was already hugely predisposed to loving this, even before I laughed and cried and empathized my way through reading this terrific speculative fiction novel.

Wu Zetian is a frontier girl on a mission. After her beloved older sister dies at the hands of Yang Guang, a male ace mecha pilot, Zetian decides to enlist so she can assassinate her sister’s killer. She knows that doing this not only condemns the rest of her family but also forsakes the guy she’s been secretly seeing for the past three years, rich city boy Gao Yizhi. But vengeance is more important to her than anything, even love.

It’s something of a surprise to arrive at training and discover that her spirit pressure, the ability that allows people to pilot and transform the mechas, is high enough to immediately qualify her to partner with Yang Guang. But it’s only her iron will and murderous intent that allow her to climb out of their mecha later alive, the sole survivor of a process that usually takes the lives of the female concubine-pilot while leaving the male pilots unscathed.

At first, the army is scandalized, especially since Zetian staged her survival as a triumph, entirely out of keeping with the docility expected of women in Huaxian society. When she refuses to back down, they partner her with Li Shimin, the most powerful pilot in the army but also a boy with a reputation as a savage patricide. Zetian is fully ready to kill him too if she has to, but discovers a surprising kinship between them. As the pair slowly bond over the abuse they’ve each suffered, they begin to fight back against the suffocating restrictions and expectations placed on them both, in the process uncovering fearful truths about the world they live in.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/27/iron-widow-iron-widow-1-by-xiran-jay-zhao/

Sep 26 2021

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, Pt. 2

The Making of the Atomic Bomb turns 35 this year. My copy is a 25th anniversary edition, and it opens with the words, “More than seven decades after its conception under the looming storm front of the Second World War, the Manhattan Project is fading into myth.” The book itself was written and published in the age of Reagan, a time when the Cold War came closer to turning hot than it had for decades, and an American president casually joked about ending human civilization.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The Manhattan Project is receding into history. “The massive production reactors and plutonium extraction canyons at Hanford, Washington; the half-mile-long uranium enrichment factory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the several hundred thousand workers who puilt and operated the vast machinery while managing to keep its purpose secret, disappear from view, leaving behind a bare nucleus of legend: a secret laboratory on a New Mexican mesa, Los Alamos, where the actual bombs were designed and built; a charismatic lab director, the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who rose to international prominence until his enemies brought him low; a lone B-29 bomber incongruently named for the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay; a devastated city, Hiroshima, and poor ruined Nagaski all but forgotten.” (p. 1)

The bombs remain, though fortunately Reagan’s bombast gave way to willingness to do business with a Soviet premier, and the Cold War ended in a way that none had foreseen when Rhodes published this book. Now the twin challenges are first, limiting a 1940s technology in the 2020s and beyond, and second, the hard work of voluntary abolition. “I think of a world without nuclear weapons not as a utopian dream but simply as a world where delivery times have been deliberately lengthened to months or even years, with correspondingly longer periods interim during which to resolve disputes short of war.” (p. 9)

Rhodes intended to tell the story of the bombs and found that he was telling a story of discovery. He learned that

… nuclear physics is almost entirely an experimental science. Which means that the discoveries that led to the bombs were the consequence of the physical manipulation of objects in the laboratory; this metal box, fitted with a radiation source, a sample inserted, measured using this instrument, with this result, and so on. Once I’d mastered the jargon, it was possible to read through the classic papers in the field, visualize the experiments, and understand the discoveries, at least where their application to making bombs was concerned. (p. 3)

Understanding the physical events showed him something important about their human meaning.

It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, British, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons.
Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might have hidden from the politicians and the generals. To the contrary, here was a new insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coax forth. … “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” (pp. 3–4)

Happy Petrov Day.

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Optional musical accompaniment to this post:

Red Car, by Trees.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, Part 1.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/26/the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb-by-richard-rhodes-pt-2/

Sep 25 2021

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

What would young Mexicans in the 1970s who cared about literature more than anything else be like? Roberto Bolaño gives at least one version in The Savage Detectives. The book is anything but a careful study. Over the course of its 577 pages, Bolaño pulls out nearly all of the stops (the book he truly pulled out all the stops for is 2666, which is more than twice as long as The Savage Detectives and still memorable a decade after I read it) as he portrays a would-be avant-garde literary movement, the visceral realists, and some of its members as they wrestle with writing, poetry, Mexico, each other, Europe, themselves, mental illness, growing older, and much more.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño divides the novel into three parts. The first (“Mexicans Lost in Mexico”) and third (“The Sonora Desert”) are diaries written by Juan García Madero, a poet and new university student who is seventeen when the story begins in 1975. The second and far longer part (“The Savage Detectives” takes the middle 400 pages of the book) is a series of first-person statements by a very large cast of characters who had contact of one sort or another with the visceral realists from 1976 to 1996. Some of the characters recur, but many do not.

Amadeo Salvatierra opens several of the chapters. He’s from an older generation of litterateurs; by 1976 he’s earning his living as a scribe for the illiterate people of Mexico City. He likes his mezcal and his tequila very much, and the two visceral realists, the leaders of the movement, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, are not above encouraging these habits as they ask try to glean information from him about a nearly lost Mexican poet of the 1920s, Cesárea Tinajero.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/25/the-savage-detectives-by-roberto-bolano/

Sep 24 2021

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, Pt. 2

Harkaway takes the epigraph for Gnomon from The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski. “When the first question was asked in a direction opposite to the customary one, it was a signal that the revolution had begun.” Ethiopia, as portrayed in The Emperor is a land of whispers and intrigues, barely contending with modern technology, shaped by the personal rule of one man applied to a country of some thirty million. It nearly directly opposite to England with the System and the Witness.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

Inspector Neith experiences imperial Ethiopia through the narrative of Berihun Bekele, a painter who was a young man in the waning days of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign and a grandfather by the time of the story that Neith encounters. His granddaughter Annie is a brilliant technologist and is leading the development of an immersive computer game called Witnessed. The features of both the in-game world and the gameplay bear a close resemblance to Neith’s world of System and Witness. Is she seeing the early days of the world she knows? If she is, how did it get into Diana Hunter’s mind?

Inspector Neith also pursues the truth about Diana Hunter outside of the interrogation recordings, but the people she finds connected to the case are no less unsettling than the personas yielded up in the interrogation. One person, for example, turns up inside of Hunter’s house, which has been built as a Faraday cage, a place where the Witness cannot look. Neith encounters this person on subsequent occasions, and each time they seem to be invisible to Witness surveillance which is, at least in theory, ubiquitous. She talks to a person from an obscure corner of infrastructure governance who knows an improbable amount about interrogations such as Hunter’s; later Neith learns that the obscure agency also plays an important role in the Ethiopian narrative. Similar interactions with a bookseller, a technician who speaks of glitches in the System, a professor of semiotics and others point toward elements of Hunter’s various narratives and are pointed to by those same stories. Which way does the causation run? Is there any way to tell? Is there, in fact, a difference?

Neith finds herself drawn in deeper when one of her “real-world” interlocutors is murdered by something from within one of Hunter’s narratives. The event is impossible, and yet the evidence is incontrovertible. Moreover, it echoes an equally impossible killing inside another of Hunter’s narratives.

By this point, enough gnomons have burst in perpendicularly to make telling time by their shadows quite a challenge. Harkaway manages the act, showing events first in one light, then in another, with each flip of the switch casting a new illumination. It all comes together in the end of this hugely ambitious novel. It is not tied up in a bow, wrapped for the audience; instead, the lights converge leaving some things clear, others in shadow, with interpretation of the intersection of gnomon and plane ultimately up to the reader.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/24/gnomon-by-nick-harkaway-pt-2/

Sep 23 2021

Gutter Mage by J.S. Kelley

I want to sit J S Kelley down, look into their eyes and assure them that the world desperately needs a Gutter Mage series.

Okay, so maybe by “the world” I mean “I” but this book was just so much fantastic fun! Crossing an original fantasy concept with a hardboiled mystery with distinct Western elements, spiced up with excellent repartee and a bisexual heroine with equal amounts self-awareness and depth, this book just absolutely dazzled me. Our heroine Rosalind (named like all the other characters after the Shakespearean) is better known by the disparaging moniker Gutter Mage, tho no one’s ever called her that to her face twice. Earning a living as a fixer with the help of her childhood friend and business partner Lysander, she accepts a lucrative job that requires more than the usual amount of discretion.

Lord Edmund of House Ariel has recently become a proud parent, but his son has been kidnapped in what looks like an elaborate plan hatched by some very skilled mages, presumably of the upstart new Alath Guild. As there’s nothing more Rosalind enjoys than sticking it to some Guild Mages — and since Lysander really wants to build up his nest egg so that he and his lovely wife Portia can finally start expanding their family — this looks like the perfect case for them, with Lysander’s brawn and social skills backing up Roz’s considerable magical capabilities. But something smells fishy almost from the very start, and the further Roz and Lysander investigate, the greater the likelihood that they’re being lied to, and that the mastermind behind all this is the person Roz least wants to see in all the world.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/23/gutter-mage-by-j-s-kelley/

Sep 22 2021

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, Pt. 1

Some time past the middle of the twenty-first century, Britain offers its citizens the safest, most democratic, best-adjusted society in human history.

Every person under the System is encouraged — though not compelled — to spend a certain amount of time each week voting, and is semi-randomly assigned to decision-making bodies for the duration of their session. Each body will most likely be around two hundred individuals strong, and will deal either collectively or in subcommittee jury group with anything from asylum requests or the allocation of medical resources to commercial disputes. It is the most nuanced and democratic system of direct governance ever devised, and it requires genuine participation from the polity. For the body of the state to perform its function properly, each person must make his or her own decision in the light of their personal experience and opinion without being influenced by others at the formative stage, so sessions are initially private and remain anonymous throughout. Each problem is proposed to each person in a way that is fractionally different, tailored precisely to pique their interest and understanding, their self-interest and their altruism, so that every choice is made with the greatest awareness of consequence and meaning. (p. 25)

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

But the workings of a utopian participatory democracy are not what Gnomon is about. They are the necessary foundation of a story — or more properly a nested set of stories — that is both wider and deeper. It begins with Inspector Mielikki Neith making a televised statement about the death of a suspect in the custody of the Witness, while people use the System to examine her microexpressions to gauge whether her pained honesty about how everyone at the Witness feels this failure is faked, and Neith herself follows the polling numbers that trail across her screen. Or maybe it begins with the death of Diana Hunter, the death that distresses Inspector Neith because of the failure it implies, though Hunter’s case will do much more than distress her as Gnomon proceeds. Or maybe it begins with Hunter being called in for interrogation. The first words that she gives to the System are the title of the first section of Gnomon, “my mind on the screen.” In fuller form:

“I can see my mind on the screen.”
Hunter’s first thought during the examination is like the barb on a fishhook, and Neith instinctively loathes it. These eight unremarkable words cause her to tighten her jaw as if expecting a blow. The phrase is, to be sure, unusually clear and strong, quite ready to be vocalised. One must assume that Hunter was deliberately recording a message, in which case: to whom? To Neith, as the investigating officer? Or to an imagined historian? Why does the tone, the clean, discursive flavour of Hunter’s mind, trouble that part of the Inspector that is devoted to a professional mistrust of appearances? (p. 10)

A gnomon is the bar sticking out from a slab that turns a flat surface into a sundial. Its intrusion changes a physical phenomenon into a source of meaning and measurement. “In geometry, a gnomon is a plane figure formed by removing a similar parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram; or, more generally, a figure that, added to a given figure, makes a larger figure of the same shape.” Gnomon is filled with such irruptions, things that intrude among planes, cast shadows, and change meanings.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/22/gnomon-by-nick-harkaway-pt-1/

Sep 21 2021

Iyanu: Child Of Wonder Volume 1 by Roye Okupe & Godwin Akpan

The second title in the YouNeek YouNiverse is just as gorgeous as its predecessor, the first volume of Malika: Warrior Queen, if not more so. The digital art is rendered with a colorful airiness reminiscent of manga but with decidedly African influences. And the use of color throughout is simply mind-blowing: Godwin Akpan is so majorly talented!

If only the storyline kept up quite as well with the illustrations. I have the general idea of where the plot is going, but the layers of story are too frustratingly opaque. Essentially, young Iyanu has been raised just outside the city walls of Elu by the wise woman Olori, who is skilled in eliminating a mysterious force known only as Corruption. But the death of Elu’s king sets in motion a power play by the new king’s chancellor Noru, that would eliminate Olori and Iyanu while doing nothing to alleviate the suffering of Elu’s citizens, whose welfare is championed only by much maligned foreign minister Uwa.

By the end of the book, I’d gotten an inkling of why Noru was pushing as hard as he was, but I’m genuinely surprised that Uwa is the only person not taken in by what’s an obvious con. Noru is so entirely shifty, making portentous declarations with only the vaguest of claims to back them up, that it makes everyone who goes along with him look hopelessly gullible. It’s one thing if he were speechifying to a desperate populace, but he’s mainly talking to the entrenched ruling class, who have the luxury — but clearly not the brains — to ponder his pronouncements and push back, especially when said pronouncements are clearly against their own interests. It is absolutely mind-boggling how cow-like the new king is in just going along with what Noru tells him to do. Maybe this is a plot-point later, but there are no indications that the ruling class’ submission is due to anything but sheer plot devicery.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/21/iyanu-child-of-wonder-volume-1-by-roye-okupe-godwin-akpan/

Sep 20 2021

From Page to Screen: Dune

Confession time: Though I have read Dune several times after encountering it at an early and impressionable age, I don’t think that I have read it this century. My recollection is more impressionistic than detailed, and my impression is that the movie got all of the most important parts of the story up on the screen and made the famously sprawling story comprehensible. One important caveat is that the 2021 Dune only tells part of the novel’s tale. (Discussion of the plot for a book that’s been out for more than 50 years may reveal some of its details.)

Dune by Frank Herbert

It goes as far as Paul and Jessica’s escape into the desert after the Harkonnen attack on the Atreides. I was discussing it with a friend this morning and said that’s at most a third or a fourth of the way through the book — the friend said more like an eighth — but on reflection it also makes considerable sense. Everything leading up to Paul going into the desert is Before; everything that follows is After. The Harkonnen attack and devastation of House Atreides, though it comes relatively early in the novel, is the hinge of the external action, and that’s what the movie is made to show.

Paul’s journey to becoming Muad’Dib is an internal journey; his eventual leadership of the Fremen is the external one that the second half of Dune — assuming it gets made in the nearish future — will presumably show. It will be a great, epic visual story when the second half is done, if it is done on the scale of the first.

Dune movie poster

As a story to watch, Dune is brilliant. It’s a fully developed interstellar civilization, complete in itself, and alien. (While there are, inevitably, recognizable bits of earthly cultures, it’s not like Game of Thrones where I called the first season “War of the Roses plus Mongols,” and was able to add, “Yep, there’s the Vikings, there’s Henry VIII” and so forth.) This is a far future with a deep past, and both aspects are visible on the screen. I could happily watch for many hours. Listen, too. The movie’s score, by Hans Zimmer, melds the times and cultures up on the big screen, conveying emotions and also providing sounds that are simultaneously familiar and strange.

Though the film clocks in at just over two and a half hours, Dune is epic enough that some key characters and concepts are given relatively short shrift. Mentats were something that appealed to precocious me when I first read the book; they’re shown but not really explained for anyone not already familiar with how Herbert’s worlds work. Viewers don’t know why the Atreides trust Dr Yue; they’ll be less surprised at what happens than the characters are. Gurney Halleck gets off one of the movie’s few funny lines; who he is and why he stands next to the Duke are hardly explored at all. Cuts had to be made, even for a long movie. In general, Dune has made them judiciously.

Some of the flaws in the story come straight from the novel. House Atreides has supposedly been around for thousands of years without fully internalizing the concept of “an heir and a spare.” Yes, yes, Jessica and the Bene Gesserit breeding project and all that. Still. Failure to have an adult heir is the key failure mode of noble lines. It’s best not to think too hard about how sandworms could work. It’s also best not to think too hard about the Fremen industrial base, where all that technology comes from, or how it got developed. (Or if you do want to think entirely too hard about the Fremen, here is a good place to start.)

The flaw, such as they are, were easy for me to ignore in exchange for an enormous, gorgeous compelling story. I hope to catch it again, on the biggest screen that I can find.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/20/from-page-to-screen-dune/

Sep 19 2021

Descending Figure by Louise Glück

Glück divides Descending Figure into three sections, “The Garden,” “The Mirror,” and “Lamentations,” though I cannot say that I found the division particularly helpful or enlightening. Certainly there is a lot of lamenting in the final section, but there is a lot of it in the rest of the collection as well. This is a book whose first poem is titled “The Drowned Children,” and it begins horrifyingly matter-of-factly: “You see, they have no judgment. So it is natural that they should drown…” Part of me wants to read this poem as a supernatural tale, with a non-human narrator puzzled that its listeners should feel anything strongly about the children’s deaths, explaining to its audience that something of the children remains, “And yet they hear the names they used/like lures slipping over the pond…” Part of me wants to read it in the voice of a grieving parent, going to pieces over the course of its three stanzas. Part of me wants to just reject it entirely, especially the second stanza’s start: “But death must come to them differently/so close to the beginning.”

Descending Figure byLouise Glück

I suspect my first reaction is a large part of the reason I find myself sliding off of Glück’s poems so often. I’m reminded of what Jo Walton wrote about the ending of Middlemarch: “…Dorothea’s story at least ends happily, if unconventionally. That is, unconventionally for a Victorian novel. She doesn’t get to be the ambassador to Jupiter, more’s the pity.” My sensibility would find it perfectly natural for a character to be ambassador to Jupiter. I suspect that Glück has firm ideas (or at least had them when she was writing these poems more than 40 years ago) about who her narrators are and who their audiences are, and I’m willing to bet there’s not a member of the Jovian diplomatic corps among them. More’s the pity.

There could be. In various poems in this collection gods are invoked; statues’ immobility is remarked upon unfavorably, perhaps they could be persuaded to move about a bit and bring some liveliness. In the poem that gives its title to the first section of Descending Figure — and indeed in a sub-part of that poem with the same name, the garden is personified, but how much more would I have related to the poem if it turned out the garden could speak? Instead it just admires the poem’s undefined “you,” and “smears itself with green pigment/ … so that you will come to it with your lovers.” Glück remains resolutely mundane, while I try to read her poems into a much wilder work, and so we connect rather poorly.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/19/descending-figure-by-louise-gluck/

Sep 18 2021

Fletcher and Zenobia by Victoria Chess and Edward Gorey

I don’t have all that much to say about Fletcher and Zenobia except that reading it makes me very happy, every time. It hits just the right note of whimsy without being twee. It’s mildly melancholy at the beginning, then enlivened, then worrisome again, and then everything is pleasantly resolved at the end. What more could I ask for?

Fletcher and Zenobia

Fletcher is a cat who lives in the biggest tree “for miles around. He had run up it in a moment of thoughtless abandon and ever since had been unable to get down again.” As cats do. He is well provided for by the contents of a “vast, brass-bound leather trunk.” Provisions include “a collection of hats for all occasions. Alas, not one single one had arisen as long as Fletcher had been in the tree.”

Zenobia is an old-fashioned doll. “She was dressed in mauve velvet, and though her face was plain, the ribbons on her gown and the flowers on her hat were stylish indeed—not to mention her buttons.” Fletcher discovers her inside a papier-mâché egg in the trunk.

She looked around her with puzzled interest
“We are in a tree,” said Fletcher.
“A perfect place for a sunny summer afternoon,” said Zenobia. “Where do you live otherwise?”
Fletcher explained that there wasn’t any otherwise.

Thus summarizing the dilemma perfectly.

They come up with something to do, which turns out to provide an occasion for the wearing of hats. One thing leads to another, and by the end of the book things are very different, and I am happy for having read it.

Some sample illustrations are below the fold.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/18/fletcher-and-zenobia-by-victoria-chess-and-edward-gorey/