Dec 07 2020

Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology edited by Mur Lafferty & S. B. Divya

I am not a pod(cast)person, but this anthology might change that for me! Or at least get me out of my very narrow lane of go-to things to listen to while wrapping Christmas presents or other visual-heavy artsy-crafty things. I tend to enjoy more radio-drama-type fare like Limetown or, even older than that, Sherlock Holmes stories that actually aired on the radio in the previous century. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t heard of Escape Pod and its sister casts, just that I haven’t had a chance to enjoy it yet, tho its reputation in the field is legendary.

So when I heard that they’d come up with an anthology of fifteen stories to celebrate their fifteen years in operation, I jumped at the chance to sample their wares! Just the author list alone is enough to make the contemporary sci-fi fan salivate, with luminaries such as N. K. Jemisin, John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow among the contributors, alongside perhaps lesser known authors like Tim Pratt and Tina Connolly, who coincidentally provided two of my favorite stories here. Ms Connolly’s Lions And Tigers And Girlfriends was a sweetly hilarious tale of theater kids on a generation ship, and I actually cried when Kai gave a stirring speech to rally her peers in communicating all their anger, hope and fear into storytelling (but also I am a sucker for stories that champion stories.) Mr Pratt’s A Princess Of Nigh-Space was almost a complete 180 in attitude, as a young woman grapples with her grandmother’s legacy: I found it chillingly charming regardless, and a nice upending of the Lost Heir trope.

Another favorite of mine here was Cory Doctorow’s Clockwork Fagin, which is also my favorite work of his to date. Set in an alternate steampunk reality, it tells the tale of long-suffering orphans living under the petty tyranny of a Dickensian Fagin figure, until a boy just as ruthless as the master comes in and refuses to be abused. I also enjoyed Ms Jemisin’s Give Me Cornbread Or Give Me Death, which imagines a future resistance against a tyranny extrapolated in distressingly logical if pessimistic fashion from the current state of American affairs. Another lively extrapolation of the future was on display in Tobias Buckell’s thoughtful The Machine That Would Rewild Humanity — if things ever come to the pass described in his story, I’m rather inclined to agree with the narrator’s actions (tho I did think it a bit silly that the future society didn’t care about “why” criminals committed their crimes but did care about understanding the criminals, which seem to me integral parts of one another.) Mr Scalzi’s Alien Animal Encounters was a cute/titillating/appalling series of vignettes that ended hilariously in large part due to its verisimilitude. Kameron Hurley’s Citizens Of Elsewhen felt very much of a piece with her excellent novel The Light Brigade, but with an interesting twist that is unfortunately spoiled by the illuminating, perhaps too much so, foreword by Escape Pod’s creator, Serah Eley. I did enjoy Ms Eley’s descriptions of each story, but would probably save the entire foreword for reading after the rest of the book. One thing I did disagree with her tho, was in her characterization of editor Mur Lafferty’s entry here, The Fourth Nail, as a satisfying standalone. It was a good story but definitely felt to me like a chapter from a bigger novel, as did Greg van Eekhout’s Spaceship October. The latter, at least, ended on less of a cliffhanger than the former.

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Dec 06 2020

Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley

Bro! As has been said before, Beowulf is a poem that forces translators to show their style from the very first word. That word in the original is “Hwæt,” an Old English attention grabber, and how translators render it tells a lot about what’s coming in the rest of the poem. Will the version lean heavily on medievalisms? Look for a “Lo!” or “Hark!” or, heaven forfend, “Forsooth!” right at the beginning. Seamus Heaney, translator of the only other Beowulf I have read, opted for “So,” and Headley describes that choice in her introduction to her version as “taken from the memory of his Irish uncle telling tales at the table.” (xx) She continues:

Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley

I come equipped with my own memories of sitting at the bar’s end listening to men navigate darts, trivia, and women, and so, in this book, I translate [hwæt] as ‘Bro.’ The entire poem, and especially the monologues of the men in it, feels to me like the sort of competitive conversations I’ve often heard between men, one insisting on his right to the floor while simultaneously insisting that he’s friendly. ‘Bro’ is, to my ear, a means of commanding attention while shuffling focus calculatedly away from the hierarchy. (xx-xxi)

Headley adds:

Depending on the tone, ‘bro’ can render you family or foe. The poem is about that notion, too. … When I use ‘bro’ elsewhere in the poem, whether in the voice of Beowulf, Hrothgar, or the narrator, it’s to keep us thinking of the ways that family can be sealed by formulation, the ways that men can afford (or deny) one another power and safety by using coded language, and erase women from power structures by speaking collegially only to other men.
There’s another way of using ‘bro,’ of course, and that is as a means of satirizing a certain form of inflated, overconfident, aggressive male behavior. I think the poet’s own language sometimes does that, periodically weighing in with commentary about how the men in the poem think all is well, but have discerned nothing about blood relatives’ treachery and their own heathen helplessness. (xvi)

Right off the bat, Headley is letting readers know that she’ll be using plenty of contemporary language, looking at the roles of masculinity in the stories Beowulf contains, and emphasizing the layers of commentary and story within the overall work. And there are plenty of layers. For anyone who hasn’t read Beowulf in a many years, or is coming to it for the first time, there are not just the three main stories — Beowulf’s fight against Grendel that starts the whole thing off, the reprise against Grendel’s mother, and many years later Beowulf’s final battle against a dragon — there are all kinds of side notes and backstory. As Headley puts it, “The poem employs time passing and regressing, future predictions, quick History 101s, neglected bits of necessary information flung, as needed, into the tale. The original reads, at least in some places, like Old English freestyle, and in others like the wedding toast of a drunk uncle who’s suddenly remembered a poem he memorized at boarding school.” (xiv)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/06/beowulf-translated-by-maria-dahvana-headley/

Dec 04 2020

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

At this point in my experience with Lily King, I know what to expect: a meticulously rendered milieu with quietly simmering emotions that are universal despite the very specific circumstances and locales of our narrators, and then BAM! a figurative punch to the face, and then the throat, and then the solar plexus, rendering this reader completely helpless, tears unexpectedly streaming down my face after being lulled by her deceptively tranquil prose. She did this with Euphoria, a story loosely based on the life of Margaret Mead, and six years later — the same amount of time that it takes Writers & Lovers’ protagonist Casey to finish writing her book — here I am in my kitchen, feeling as if Ms King has plunged her hand into my psyche, rummaged round and brought out my raw and bleeding heart for everyone to see, again.

Here’s the thing, tho: this is an entirely commonplace story being told here. Casey is 31 years-old, a former prodigy turned struggling author who supports herself by waitressing at a tony Cambridge, Massachusetts restaurant. It’s 1997, her mother has recently died, and she’s grieving and trying to make sense of her own life while figuring out the romantic relationships she finds herself in. It’s essentially a bildungsroman with a slightly older protagonist than usual. Her two main romances, or the men she’s trying to choose between, serve as stand-ins for greater issues and desires, not that that’s ever stated so bluntly. Oskar, the older established author with two delightful children, represents stability and family and the future she wants, all in one convenient, immediate package. Silas, whom she lusts after, is talented but erratic: the perfect embodiment of the bohemian life she currently leads. While I wanted her to choose neither, it actually worked out better than I thought it would in the end. Mostly, I admired how she didn’t have to compromise, how all her hard work and self-belief paid off even as I felt deeply her struggles with poverty and the American health insurance system and just some really shitty people and situations. Those restaurant scenes brought me back so vividly to my own restaurant years that I felt traumatized all over again; by the midpoint of the book, I empathized so deeply with Casey that it felt like she was a former co-worker telling me all about her life while we were waiting for our tables to clear.

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Dec 03 2020

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Books 1, 3, 4, 5 & 6 by Jeff Kinney

My 9 year-old has been nagging me so hard to finish reading these books so we can discuss them together, which has been an experience at once delightful (he wants to discuss books with me!) and disconcerting (someone is nagging me to read?) So I’ve been slipping several of these into my schedule and am slowly catching up with Jms, tho not as quickly as he’d like, if we’re being perfectly honest.

Since I’ve been reading these slightly out of order, I thought I’d go back to the beginning and fill in the gaps from there, starting with the series’ debut. Honestly, I’m glad this wasn’t where I started, because the titular wimpy kid of Book One is insufferable. Lazy, mean and entitled, following Greg Heffley’s adventures in this volume is an exercise in tamping down my desire to constantly remind my kid that this is not how good, considerate people behave. That said, I do feel that this is an oddly accurate recounting of the author’s growing up experiences (here in Silver Spring, MD!) some decades ago, particularly in his father’s aversion to his sons doing anything remotely “girly”. Not that I know of this as fact: it just rings with an authenticity that’s hard to fake.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/03/diary-of-a-wimpy-kid-books-1-3-4-5-6-by-jeff-kinney/

Dec 02 2020

Bluebeard’s First Wife by Ha Seong-nan

Happy December, everyone! Let’s start the month with a chilling read!

I have a bad habit of not remembering why I picked up certain volumes, not helped by the often considerable lag time between me deciding I want to read a book and me actually getting the opportunity to read it. So I vaguely recall placing a library hold on Bluebeard’s First Wife by Ha Seong-nan because I was told it was a collection of horror stories set in contemporary South Korea. And it’s not. It’s actually better.

I mean, if your idea of horror is anything psychologically thrilling a/o supernaturally tinged, then sure, BFW is going to be the spooky read you’re looking for. Of the 11 stories included here, only two have an overtly supernatural component to them, and even fewer verge into territory so violent or grotesque that the horror genre may take over from mere crime. But each and every one of these tales is disquieting and sad, with survival being perhaps the happiest ending available to the heroes, who are also often the victims, of these stories. In some ways, this book reminded me of Patricia Highsmith’s Little Tales Of Misogyny: where Ms Highsmith wrote with a barely concealed contempt of her characters however, Ms Ha treats hers only with empathy, even when they’re being foolish or just plain wrong.

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Nov 30 2020

Ghost River: The Fall And Rise Of The Conestoga by Lee Francis IV, Weshoyot Alvitre & Will Fenton

With Native American Heritage Month coming to a close, I’m so glad I could finally get to this graphic novel!

The history and, frankly, present-day reality of America’s indigenous peoples is too often overlooked, particularly in relation to the settlers and policies that continue to drive them to the margins of our nation, if not to outright extermination. So it’s important for books like this one, and especially in the reader-accessible format of graphic novels, to keep telling the stories of Native Americans past and present, to amplify their voices and remind readers, “We are here. We matter. We will not fade away.”

Created as part of the Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives On Colonial America project supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, this volume examines the massacre of the Conestoga in today’s Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, from their own perspective, both then and now. An entire settlement was razed by selfish white men trying to justify their own greed, who then went on to murder the survivors held in (a somewhat condescending before becoming entirely failed) protective custody. It’s a harrowing tale that deserves greater publicity, and I’m glad Lee Francis IV and Weshoyot Alvitre collaborated to tell it, and especially that they chose to center the Conestoga as the vital, beating heart of their story.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/30/ghost-river-the-fall-and-rise-of-the-conestoga-by-lee-francis-iv-weshoyot-alvitre-will-fenton/

Nov 27 2020

Record Of A Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers #3) by Becky Chambers

Every book of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series has centered on a slightly different, but extremely relevant, facet of life that is common to the modern millennial and Gen Zer, perhaps even more so than to prior generations. Her knock-out debut, The Long Road To A Small Angry Planet, discussed the found families that have become integral parts of (particularly young adult) society, while its follow-up, A Closed And Common Orbit, focused on personhood, adult autonomy and, in a more overt nod to its science fiction setting, sentience. This third installment of the series edges from the social to the political after a fashion, tackling the topic of migration at a complete remove from any real-world policies, tho it’s pretty clear that Ms Chambers, like myself, is an open borders advocate, if her narrative choices are anything to go by.

Record Of A Spaceborn Few follows the lives of five human descendants of the Exodan Fleet, as the survivors who fled a dying Earth for the stars (as opposed to Mars or the Outer Ring planets) call themselves, interspersed with the sociological observations of a Harmagian anthropologist, Ghuh’loloan. The Harmagian has come to visit one of these ships now that the fleet has lived for several generations as part of the Galactic Commons uniting most of the known universe’s sentient species, and Isabel, one of our viewpoint characters, serves as her guide. As one of her ship’s resident archivists, Isabel is in an excellent position not only to show Ghuh’loloan around, but also to answer her many questions.

The other four descendants are Tess, the sister of the pilot from TLRtaSAP, a middle-aged technician struggling to raise her two young children and look after her increasingly irascible dad while her husband is off mining asteroids; Kip, a disgruntled 16 year-old who wants more than what he thinks the Fleet has to offer; Eyas, a caretaker for the dead whose lofty position in society can’t make up for how lonely she often feels, and Sawyer, a young man who’s lived his entire life on the Harmagian planet of Mushtullo and is looking for something new. The way their narratives intersect makes for a really comprehensive overview of why people uproot their entire lives for territory foreign to them, and sometimes why they don’t, and sometimes why they return, and what our responsibilities are to those who choose to brave new places in search of safety or belonging. It is one of the most powerful, intensely empathetic looks at the immigrant experience that I’ve ever read. This quietly devastating novel had me ugly crying my way through entire passages that could have easily described the inner turmoil of my teens and 20s, even as I recognized and grieved the differences that had me far removed from some of the decisions made.

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Nov 25 2020

Raybearer (Raybearer #1) by Jordan Ifueko

This book is fucking flawless and possibly the first time in recent years that a YA debut has deserved all the praise it receives. FLAWLESS, my friends, and easily one of the best fantasy/YA novels ever written.

Raybearer opens on a young, love-starved girl named Tarisai who is brought up by servants in a secluded manor. Her mother, known only as The Lady, visits from time to time, and is one of the few people unafraid to touch her. Tarisai, you see, is psychometric, able to read memories of people and objects by touch, and is being raised by The Lady with a single purpose: to kill a particular boy once she loves him the most.

The boy, it turns out, is Crown Prince Dayo, and Tarisai must be accepted as one of the members of his council in order to further her mother’s plan. Thing is, Dayo is extremely lovable, and Tarisai, having been sent to live at the Children’s Palace as a candidate for said council, finds herself both drawn to him and struggling to resist her mother’s will. And that’s pretty much all I can tell you without ruining the rest of the book, but there’s a convincing found family and love stories; excellent Afro-centric world-building and magic system, and really deep moral and philosophical/political struggles, far more than I’ve come to expect from recent YA. The relationships are complex and nothing is predictable, with all manner of betrayal and violence and empathy and love, explored with sensitivity, depth and authenticity by the truly gifted Jordan Ifueko. She knows how to write sympathetic, realistic characters who are both good and evil, who feel entirely fleshed out and speak and behave so naturally as to feel like Ms Ifueko is scribing a story instead of creating one. The complex relationship between Tarisai and her mother, especially, is beautifully depicted, capturing perfectly the push-pull of feelings in a young girl who wants to please a toxic and not entirely unsympathetic parent.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/25/raybearer-raybearer-1-by-jordan-ifueko/

Nov 24 2020

Gillbert #3: The Flaming Carats Evolution by Art Baltazar

I got my 9 year-old to do a buddy read on this one with me, and he definitely liked it a little more than I did, story-wise, at least. We both greatly enjoyed Art Baltazar’s delightfully rounded, pastel-hued art, which blends alien action with underwater adventure in a kid-friendly and -accessible way. This is the creative genius behind Young Justice and Tiny Titans, after all, so his art is going to have lots of wide-ranging appeal.

Where Jms’ and my opinions diverged was on the story, which is basically this: Gillbert is the heir to the kingdom of Atlanticus, and with assorted family and friends must deal with a new threat brought about by the ongoing evolution of the evil alien Pyrockians. Gillbert’s circle of friends is vastly enlarged when Anne Phibian takes him home to meet her family, who want to inspect this boy she’s been spending so much time with. It’ll take all our heroes’ connections — underwater, on land and in space — to foil the Pyrockians’ evil plans.

Personally, I thought the story quite slight for the number of pages, especially since a good part of it was spent recapping the cast and how they’d been introduced in the past two books. That was actually Jms’ favorite part of the volume tho, getting to know all the characters. We did both appreciate the not too heavy-handed message about love saving the day in the end.

Tonally, everything reminded me very much of a Hellboy-lite, unsurprising given Mr Baltazar’s previous experience on Itty Bitty Hellboy. The banter between the characters was nice, but I still don’t understand how the Phibians knew the Pyrockians were behind the initial sign of underwater disturbance. Jms seemed satisfied with the story, tho, and since he’s part of the book’s target demographic of middle-grade readers, I suppose that’s more important than my own satisfaction.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/24/gillbert-3-the-flaming-carats-evolution-by-art-baltazar/

Nov 23 2020

From Page To Screen: The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski

I’m not deeply knowledgeable regarding The Witcher property, having only started with the third game (brilliant) and going on to enjoy The Last Wish, the first of Andrzej Sapkowski’s phenomenally successful fantasy series. While Blood Of Elves and The Time Of Contempt languish still on my TBR pile, I did manage to find time to watch the Netflix miniseries starring the mind-erasingly hunkiest man on the planet, Henry Cavill. I’d heard good things, so was wildly disappointed to discover that this show sucks. It’s so bad, it’s actually made Henry Cavill less attractive to me, a feat not even his myriad scandals could manage.

The main problem here is that the scripts are terrible and the directing choices atrocious. I don’t fault any of the actors, all of whose talent manages to shine through despite some truly execrable material. What I don’t understand is how you take the thoughtful, morally nuanced writing of both books and video game and turn them into this absolute dreck. I can’t get over how even the video game, a medium that often lags behind its more established cousins in terms of depth, is better written than this dreadful show.

It starts from the very first episode, where Geralt of Rivia must choose “the lesser of two evils” all while spouting philosophical purity nonsense that should shame anyone past the age of 21. Unlike in the books and game, the concept of damned if you do, damned if you don’t is presented as an ideological quandary instead of the compromise that loners like Geralt must constantly make in order to survive. The bizarre estrangement of lived-in feeling from genuine moral struggle is also apparent when Geralt tells the elf king to let the past go and focus on the future survival of his people instead: in the books it’s given as hard-won advice, but on the show it comes across as an arrogant command for the elf king to just get over it and move on already. The show strips Geralt of his hard-won insight and instead turns him into a bro-it-all who could fix all the world’s problems if the world would just listen to him. It’s… tacky and sophomoric and a bizarre translation of Eastern European attitudes to the most supercilious of transatlantic sensibilities.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/23/from-page-to-screen-the-witcher-by-andrzej-sapkowski/