Aug 04 2019

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

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

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

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

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

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

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Aug 03 2019

Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

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

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Jul 29 2019

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

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

The Tea Master and the Detective

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jul 27 2019

Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor

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

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Jul 24 2019

The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark

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

The Black God's Drums

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

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

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

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Jul 23 2019

Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jul 22 2019

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

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

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jul 21 2019

Tauben im Gras by Wolfgang Koeppen

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

Tauben im Gras by Wolfgang Koeppen

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

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

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Jul 21 2019

The Night Manager by John Le Carré

Not quite 100 pages in on this one, I pronounced the Eight Deadly Words. Sorry, eponymous Jonathan. Even sorrier, Sophie, who lived and died some years before the main action, and who existed to give Jonathan regrets. And perhaps to show that the corrupt Egyptian brothers might be a darker shade of grey than the British spies. You at least deserved better.

The Night Manager by John Le Carré

I’ve read a lot of Le Carré over thirty years or so, and it may be that he just doesn’t have anything new to show me. Or maybe it was just this book. I have one more on my shelves (The Tailor of Panama), so eventually I will get around to testing this thesis.

He has, together with Ian McDonald, also cured me of using the word “discreet” to describe a place such as a club or restaurant, conveying a sense of wealth and privilege, of insider knowledge, of movers and shakers conversing quietly in booths and shaping the world away from the presumably indiscreet eyes and ears of ordinary people. Le Carré has often presented spies as something of a hidden aristocracy, and I’ve decided I don’t like it any more than any other aristocracy. Goodbye “discreet,” you are now keeping company with “outstanding.”

The eponymous Jonathan is the night manager at an old-fashioned hotel in Zurich. He is also a man with a past. That includes service with the British Army in Northern Ireland and various degrees of cooperation with British intelligence. Said cooperation led to poor Sophie’s death when Jonathan let the spooks know that Sophie’s biznesman boyfriend was freelancing some large arms sales. Said boyfriend put two and two together, and presto Jonathan had both regrets and motivation.

The main story gets started one evening in January 1991 as snow is falling on Zurich and bombs are falling on Baghdad. Jonathan has learned that “the worst man in the world” will soon be lodging in his hotel. “Richard Onslow Roper, trader, of Nassau, the Bahamas” (p. 3) is on his way with his free-spending retinue to take up residence in a vast suite and shower money on the Hotel Meister Palace. Roper had been a counterparty to the Egyptian boyfriend, and probably the source of the two and two that the boyfriend added up so fatefully for poor Sophie. He trades in cocaine and weapons, among other things. He has lawyers and shell companies and plausible deniability out the wazoo. He has connections to various intelligence services, especially the British. They think he is in their pocket, and he thinks they are in his. It is a topological conundrum.

But it was not enough for me to care what happens to these people. Even the good bits, some of which — the story of Herr Kaspar’s toupee, for example — are quite good (this is Le Carré after all), were not enough. The protagonist will survive but not triumph; the antagonist will get away, though not cleanly; many prices will be paid, and few rewards will be reaped. About a fifth of the way through The Night Manager, I set it down and have not picked it up again. They will have to meet their fates without me.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/21/the-night-manager-by-john-le-carre/

Jul 20 2019

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Calculating Stars starts with a bang. Elma York, Kowal’s protagonist and first-person narrator says that she and her husband had flown up to the mountain cabin that he inherited for stargazing, “By which I mean: sex. Oh, don’t pretend that you’re shocked. Nathaniel and I were a healthy young married couple, so most of the stars I saw were painted across the inside of my eyelids.” (12) At times, Elma has a very 2010s voice for a 1950s character. Marital bliss is soon interrupted by a catastrophic event.

Although the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics has, in the book’s world, put three satellites into orbit by March 1952, they do not yet have the technology to search for asteroids whose orbit could intersect with Earth’s orbit. (In my timeline, systematic cataloging objects greater than 150 meters in size whose orbits implied a possible collision with Earth began just after the turn of the 21st century.) Geologically speaking, that’s less the blink of an eye. Unfortunately for most of life on Earth, the cosmos blinks and drops a large meteorite into the Chesapeake. Washington and Baltimore are obliterated. Congress was in session. In early chapters of the book, it’s not known whether the entire US government is wiped out, or whether a cabinet secretary of some sort might yet be found to assume the reins of power.

Elma and Nathaniel both work for NACA; he is an engineer, and she is a computer. That is, she is a person who sets up the equations for many of the tasks of space flight, and then does the calculations with pencil paper and slide rule. Electronic computers are starting to come on line later in the book, but they are not entirely reliable and prone to overheating. They had both been at Los Alamos for Trinity, so when they see the light of the meteor’s entry they immediately think that it is an atomic bomb. The radio’s continued operation tells them that there had been no electromagnetic pulse, so it’s not an atomic attack by the Russians. Nathaniel comes up with the idea of a meteorite just before the earthquake’s shock wave hits their cabin. And levels it, just after they have gotten to the relative safety of a doorframe.

As physicists, they know what is coming next. “’The airblast will be what … half an hour late? Give or take?’ For all the calm in his words, Nathaniel’s hands shook as he opened the [car] passenger door for me. ‘Which means we have another … fifteen minutes before it hits’ … All I knew for certain was that, as long as the radio was playing, it wasn’t an A-bomb. But whatever had exploded was huge.” (p. 16) They drive a bit down the mountain — they are already on the lee side — and take shelter under an overhang. Still, the airblast blows out most of their car’s windows and knocks the car itself halfway across the road. Trees are laid out like the Tunguska event.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/20/the-calculating-stars-by-mary-robinette-kowal/