Nov 15 2020

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I read Between the World and Me a lifetime ago, in early summer when it was strange to leave the neighborhood again after so many weeks of stillness. It is a hard book, not because of the difficulty of language or of its concepts, but because of the hardness of its subject: how to live and be Black in America. It is hard because of the unflinching clarity of thought that Coates brings to his question. Clear writing comes from clear thinking, and Coates’ writing is very clear indeed.

Drawing on James Baldwin’s 1962 “Letter to My Nephew,” Coates structures Between the World and Me” as a letter to his son:

I write to you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniform pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of the road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held accountable. (p. 9)

Many names, too many names, have been added to the list since the book was published in 2015. This summer, after a policeman named Derek Chauvin killed a Black man named George Floyd by kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while other police officers looked on, a large wave of protests pressed for change. Will there be change? If so, how much? No one knows, and in the meantime, Coates, his son, and millions of Americans have to live with Coates’ question every waking moment.

I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream [of white American innocence], is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself. (p. 12)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/15/between-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates/

Nov 13 2020

The Book of Malachi by T.C. Farren

I’m still thinking about this cleverly constructed fable set fifteen or so years in the future. Thirty year-old Malachi is hired to essentially be the groom for a stable of murderers whose bodies are being used as part of a top-secret organ-growing project run by Raizier Pharmaceuticals. The nutrients fed to the prisoners cause their nails to grow far faster than usual, and since the wardens would rather their cash cows didn’t hurt themselves, someone must be given the daily task of clipping their claws (if you’ll forgive my bag of mixed metaphors here.) Malachi is the perfect candidate, in large part due to his muteness. In addition to the usual remuneration, Raizier offers to graft on a new tongue for him in exchange for a little over half a year’s work. Lonely Malachi, seeing not much of a future at the chicken processing plant where he currently runs quality control, readily accepts.

The prisoners, he is told on the long journey by both car and helicraft, are the worst of the worst, rapists and killers who are being given a chance to give back to society for their misdeeds by having their bodies be used as vessels to grow extra necessary parts. After these parts are harvested, the criminals will be sent back to prison to finish out their terms. Upon arrival at the offshore rig where the prisoners are being kept, Malachi discovers that all the other staffers he’ll interact with — the non-medical staff, essentially — have also been promised organs for their loved ones: a heart here, lungs for another, arteries for a third.

The reality of the holding cell is the first shock for our new prison warden. Forty naked prisoners are held in plexiglass enclosures in one large room through which he must travel with his trolley of grooming items. Handsome, gregarious Tamba, his new roommate, oversees from the console room above, while Meirong, their cold supervisor, checks in from time to time to make sure that no one is communicating with the prisoners. Apparently, Malachi’s predecessor had made that mistake, but Raizier is confident that hiring an illiterate mute will circumvent any future issues.

Trouble is, Malachi isn’t actually illiterate, tho he’s feigned so for years as part of a self-imposed penance for the crime that cost him his tongue. As the prisoners begin to tell him their stories, however, Malachi discovers that not all crimes are created equal, and that perhaps the greatest one of all is the injustice being perpetrated on his new charges. But what can he do, a lone, mute man on a rig in the middle of the ocean?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/13/the-book-of-malachi-by-t-c-farren/

Nov 12 2020

Mad, Bad & Dangerous To Know by Samira Ahmed

I am very grouchy about this book, even though I was very excited at first to finally get my hands on this YA novel featuring feminist Muslim heroines. Samira Ahmed’s Mad, Bad & Dangerous To Know marries an intriguing high concept with a narrative that prefers to tell instead of show and relentlessly strikes dramatic poses with little depth or substance to back them up. I should know by now that mysteries diving into art and literary history are almost always going to disappoint me, but I keep holding out hope that this next one will be worth my time. MB&DtK, alas, was not.

The concept was undoubtedly v cool: French-Indian-American-Muslim Khayyam Maquet is spending the summer in Paris, as she has every of the 17 years of her life so far, in the apartment her academic parents inherited from her father’s side of the family. She’s feeling pretty glum, as she’s just spectacularly crashed and burned in an art history essay meant to impress the Art Institute of Chicago, on the possible connection between writer Alexandre Dumas and painter Eugene Delacroix. Plus, her maybe boyfriend Zaid is off to college in the fall and has been taking lots of up close and personal Instagram selfies with any number of their good-looking female mutuals back home in Illinois while she’s away.

So when Khayyam has a meet-cute with an actual living descendent of Dumas who also happens to be his very good-looking, very age-appropriate-for-her namesake, she can’t help feeling that life is giving her a sign. Alexandre is intrigued by her ideas regarding his ancestor, and the two soon embark on a semi-legal journey to uncover the truth, one that seemingly involves a raven-haired woman named Leila. Along the way, Khayyam revenge posts a few selfies of herself and Alexandre being adorable, causing Zaid to reconsider his inattention to her. Interwoven with Khayyam’s story is Leila’s tale, offering subtle parallels to the 21st century shenanigans.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/12/mad-bad-dangerous-to-know-by-samira-ahmed/

Nov 10 2020

She Lies Close by Sharon Doering

Y’aaaaall.

I’ve read plenty of books with unsympathetic narrators but this is one of the perishing few where I could sympathize with our protagonist even as I lacked any empathy for her. Grace Wright is, in temperament, my exact opposite. She has a fixed idea of how things should be, and reacts poorly when things go wrong. She’d rather take medication than undergo therapy, and is an enthusiastic helicopter parent who resents her kids, especially since divorcing the husband who cheated on her. She’s overwhelmed even before she discovers that her neighbor is a suspect in the disappearance of five year-old Ava Boone. Sleep-deprived and constantly scouring the Internet on a quest for how to fix everything in her life, she’s a mess. And then she thinks she sees Ava in the window of the house next door.

What follows is a hallucinatory descent into, if not quite the madness, then the definite temporary psychosis of a modern woman trying to keep it all together, to be the woman she thinks she’s “supposed” to be even as her mental and emotional health degrade, in no large part due to her own reactionary choices. Grace has little impulse control and cannot stop from making bad decisions, spurred on by a social milieu that tells her she shouldn’t compromise, that she only needs to lean in, to try harder while depriving her of the supportive framework to do that. Confused and anxious, she chooses paranoia at every turn. Frankly, she’s a QAnon cultist waiting to happen — certain passages, particularly the ones about falling down Internet rabbit holes and being obsessed with protecting children from strangers, remind me of profiles I’ve read of true believers.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/10/she-lies-close-by-sharon-doering/

Nov 09 2020

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

It is entirely possible that any reader of this review has in their pocket a computing device more powerful than the one whose design and initial construction are the story of The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. That machine, code named “Eagle” in the book, would eventually be sold by Data General as the MV/8000. It was a big as a good-sized kitchen appliance, and needed a separate television screen (definitely a cathode ray tube screen at the time) to manage input and some forms of output. Why read a book that is nearly 40 years old about a device that’s hilariously outdated in a field that is notoriously fast-moving?

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

First, Kidder brings the process to life. Someone far from the business might think that the design of a new computer is a bloodless affair. Kidder shows the decisions, the drama, the fights, the passion and the humor that go into the construction of a machine that, at the time, aimed to set the standards of what engineering and science could do within the constraints involved in creating a minicomputer. Sometimes the engineers had disinterested discussions about the best way to address a question; at other times, the choices they made were the result of knock-down drag-out arguments about fundamental views on how people could and should work. There was even the occasional bit of skulduggery.

Second, Kidder shows people giving their all for a project that they believe matters. They worked crazy hours, they worked in shifts, in their off hours they thought about the problems it raised, they offered their creativity, they pushed each other, they stretched their capabilities. “The Eclipse Group and the many others who had worked on the machine — including, especially, Software and Diagnostics — had created 4096 lines of microcode, which fit into a volume about eight inches thick; diagnostic programs amounting to thousands of lines of code; over 200,000 lines of system software; several hundred pages of flow charts; about 240 pages of schematics; hundreds and hundreds of engineering changes from the debugging; twenty hours of videotape to describe the new machine; and now a couple of functioning computers in blue-and-white cases, plus orders for many more on the way. Already, you could see that the engineers who had participated fully would be looking back on this experience a long time hence. It would be something unforgettable in their working lives.” (p. 276)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/09/the-soul-of-a-new-machine-by-tracy-kidder/

Nov 06 2020

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

In short: neurotic weirdo falls in love with a big ball of red flags.

One of the main reasons it took me years to come back to reading contemporary romance novels is that it infuriates me when the central premise of the book is based on a woman lapping up clearly abusive behavior from some shitheel whose main feature is his good looks. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, he’s also rich, for an injection of glamour and hopefully some expensive parting gifts for our heroine once she figures out she needs to dump the asshole. With some encouragement from Romancelandia, however, I’d recently discovered the joys of reading Helen Hoang and Alisha Rai, with neither writer promoting that kind of toxicity. But too many of the books I’ve read by other authors since have veered closer and closer to it… and then we come to The Hating Game by Sally Thorne.

So our heroine Lucy Hutton is a 28 year-old doormat with no social life because she’s always picking up the slack for her underlings at the publishing house where she’s executive assistant to the arty boss, Helene. Her nemesis Joshua Templeman is the brooding, regimented executive assistant to the business-side boss, Richard. Lucy and Joshua share an office in front of their bosses’ offices, and for the past two years (I think? Overdrive took the book back, so I can’t look it up) have been quietly feuding, engaging in any number of games of one-upmanship with few clearly defined rules. Mostly it’s a bunch of immature behavior that takes up so much time, it’s a wonder either of them gets any work done at all. Plus, they’ve run to HR complaining about the other on numerous occasions, which makes me feel like they’re actually seriously transgressing against one another and not just playfully joking. When a chance appears at a promotion that would put one in charge of the other, their simmering tension boils over and romance ensues because, as Ms Thorne puts on the very first pages of this book, there’s a fine line between love and hate, which is a line I used to torment a set of romantic nemeses back in grade school but has no business being a maxim by which to conduct adult relationships.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/06/the-hating-game-by-sally-thorne/

Nov 05 2020

Invisible Planets edited and translated by Ken Liu

With his smashingly successful translation of Liu Cixin’s The Three–Body Problem, Ken Liu introduced modern Chinese science fiction to a large English-speaking audience. The reception of the rest of Three-Body‘s trilogy, one translated by Joel Martinsen and the other by Ken Liu, showed that it was not a one-book phenomenon, and that English-speaking science fiction readers were ready, eager, for more of the genre from China.

Invisible Planets, edited by Ken Liu

Invisible Planets provides 13 short stories and three essays, plus an introduction and short notes about each author by Liu, that offer a wide-ranging sampling of science fiction from China published in Chinese between 2005 and 2014. The stories are from seven different authors, three of whom also contribute the essays.

In his introduction and his editorial choices, Liu emphasizes the diversity of science fiction from China, reflecting the vast scale and wide variety found in its country of origin. “Even within the limited selection of this anthology, you’ll encounter the ‘science fiction realism’ of Chen Qiufan, the ‘porridge SF’ of Xia Jia, the overt, wry political metaphors of Ma Boyong, the surreal imagery and metaphor-driven logic of Tang Fei, the dense, rich language-pictures painted by Cheng Jingbo, the fabulism and sociological speculation of Hao Jingfang, and the grand, hard-science-fictional imagination of Liu Cixin. … Faced with such variety, I think it is far more useful and interesting to study the authors as individuals and to treat their works on their own terms rather than to try to impose a preconceived set of expectations on them because they happen to be Chinese.” (p. 14)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/05/invisible-planets-edited-and-translated-by-ken-liu/

Nov 04 2020

We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya #1) by Hafsah Faizal

I was so chuffed to learn about this Arabian-inspired fantasy YA novel by an American niqabi, which had been getting so many rave reviews! I had to keep putting off reading it for one reason or another, but was so pleased to finally have time to settle in with it over the weekend. I was further excited to hear that it doesn’t actually have any Muslim representation, as Hafsah Faizal wants to point out that the people and myths of the Arabian peninsula are not a monolith: a very laudable aim.

So I was really perturbed to find myself already sludging through the prose from the first chapter onwards. It can take me some time to adjust to an author’s writing style so I was happy to keep persevering, but it soon got to the point where I felt that editors just gave up trying to form this mess into something readable. The prose reads as if it was written in another language before being translated back, and rather indifferently, to (mostly) standard English. The grammar was sloppy and the attempts at poetic fillips incredibly sophomoric. If I had to read the word “exhale” used as a noun one more time, I was going to hug a Ted Chiang collection to death (Exhalation is on my To-Read list, btw!) In short, this was some of the most ghastly professionally-edited English-language writing that I’ve ever read.

But more importantly, how was the story? In a word, ugh. In a phrase: both tropetastic and dull.

Zafira is a huntress who masquerades as a boy in her sexist caliphate in order to feed her people. She must travel through the madness-inducing mystical forest known as the Arz in order to find game, a forest that’s claimed the minds and lives of hundreds, including her own beloved father. When the Silver Witch appears, tasking her with a quest to retrieve a mysterious artifact that could help bring magic back to her devastated land, Katniss, I mean Zafira, has little choice but to accept.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/04/we-hunt-the-flame-sands-of-arawiya-1-by-hafsah-faizal/

Nov 01 2020

Swords Against Death by Fritz Leiber

The stories in Swords Against Death are among the first published adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, making them more than 70 years old at this writing. The bulk of them were published as stand-alone stories in pulp magazines in the 1940s and 1950s; nearly all of them predate The Lord of the Rings, some by a decade and a half. If they seem simple, or sometimes clichéd, that’s likely because Leiber wrote them when the genre was new, its conventions still being worked out. Indeed, the stories in Swords Against Death may be the source of the traditions that contemporary readers are familiar with.

Swords Against Death

That’s especially true for stories, such as “The Jewels in the Forest,” “Thieves’ House,” or “The Seven Black Priests” that read like adventures from a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Gary Gygax and the other early creators of D&D acknowledged their debt to Leiber. In particular, Leiber is the first modern author to write about a Thieves’ Guild, in which criminals are as organized as any other collection of artisans in a medieval city.

So how do they hold up, after all these years? First off, they are fast, atmospheric adventure stories, often with a twist. What is really going on in the tower in “The Jewels in the Forest”? Will Fafhrd arrive in “Thieves’ House” before midnight? Ok, there’s less suspense about that one, given that it’s not the last story featuring in the pair, but it’s not written as if everyone’s survival is assured, and that made a difference to me. Second, in contrast to a lot of modern fantasy, the world that Fafhrd and the Mouser operate in was not much thought out in advance. Nehwon sort of slowly accretes around them, from the stories. Leiber implies many different gods, guilds vying for supremacy in Lankhmar, histories behind the city’s street names, but there’s no sense that he’s worked it out in advance. Things appear as they are needed for individual stories. Curiously, I didn’t mind; I found that it lent a mythical atmosphere in stories such as “The Bleak Shore” or “The Howling Tower.”

Leiber shows his heroes as fallible to folly or to curses; at various times each rescues the other. They are each also at times too proud to show weakness in front of the other, which then gets them deeper into trouble. They get out, of course, but not completely unscathed.

I think a movie adaptation of “The Seven Black Priests” would be a terrific straightforward adventure film, although to make one in the 21st century some of the racial stereotyping would have to be changed. Swords Against Death, like its predecessor, is probably a total Bechdel fail. There may be female characters in “The Jewels in the Forest” who talk to each other, but they are appendages to the plot and of no further interest to the author.

And then there are things like “Bazaar of the Bizarre,” published in 1963. It’s not just a lush and hallucinogenic journey for Fafhrd and the Mouser, it’s as direct an anti-capitalist story as I have seen in fantasy. Here is what Ningauble, one of the pair’s sorcerous patrons, says about the Devourers, the story’s antagonists:

The Devourers are the most accomplished merchants in all the many universes — so accomplished, indeed, that they sell only trash. There is a deep necessity in this, for the Devourers must occupy all their cunning in perfecting their methods of selling and so have not an instant to spare in considering the worth of what they sell. Indeed, they dare not concern themselves with such matters for a moment, for fear of losing their golden touch — and yet such are their skills that their wares are utterly irresistible, indeed the finest wares in all the many universes — if you follow me? (p. 376)

And further:

The Devourers want not only the patronage of all beings in all universes, but — doubtless because they are afraid someone will some day raise the ever-unpleasant question of the true worth of things — they want all their customers reduced to a state of slavish and submissive suggestibility, so that they are fit for nothing whatever but to gawk at and buy the trash the Devourers offer for sale. This means of course that eventually the Devourers’ customers will have nothing wherewith to pay the Devourers for their trash, but the Devourers do not seem to be concerned with this eventuality. Perhaps they feel that there is always a new universe to exploit. (p. 377)

Pulpy and overwrought, to be sure, but also trenchant.

One of the first stories in this volume was originally published as “Two Sought Adventure.” Sought, found. And still fun for readers all these years later.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/01/swords-against-death-by-fritz-leiber/

Oct 31 2020

A(nother) Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

Just in time for the full moon falling on Halloween (the celestial alignment that drives the book’s plot), I re-read A Night in the Lonesome October. Everything I wrote about it last time holds true: it’s a romp, a hoot, a love letter to classics of Halloween and suspense, a master storyteller having fun with many different tales with no higher purpose than the joy of telling a very tall one.

A Night in the Lonesome October

It’s less a shaggy-dog story than a dog-and-cat story; Zelazny takes the watchdog Snuff as his narrator, and Snuff strikes up an unlikely friendship with Graymalk, a witch’s cat. Snuff and his master Jack, whose ripping appellation is never stated but implied throughout, are players in a Game of very high stakes. If their opponents succeed, the Elder Gods of Lovecraft’s pantheon will return to the earth and remake the world to their liking. Part of the challenge is that until the end of the Game none of the players can be sure of who is on which side, or indeed of who is playing at all.

When such a Game is afoot near London in the late 19th century, can the Great Detective be far behind? Indeed he is not, and while he seeks to unravel the secrets around him, he is hiding at least one of his own. There are probably more minor characters that I should have recognized from elsewhere, though this time through I think I spotted an American werewolf in London that I hadn’t noted before. I also enjoyed the interplay among the players’ familiars more this time than last, although Snuff showing Graymalk the Things in the Mirrors is probably still my favorite laugh-out-loud moment.

I had forgotten some of the twists and some of the puns, and was glad to be reminded of both. Zelazny’s descriptions of the Count’s doings make me sorry he didn’t write a full-length vampire novel. Terry Pratchett did better with the Igors, but Zelazny’s version is pretty good, and his depiction of the Good Doctor’s monster is sympathetic and note-perfect from a dog’s point of view.

In short, it’s a terrific book to revisit and even better to read for the first time. And if such a Game is happening tonight, you’ve probably still got enough time to get through it before things come to a head.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/10/31/another-night-in-the-lonesome-october-by-roger-zelazny/