Jun 19 2020

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

Whyyyy did I not know this was set in an alternate universe early 20th century Egypt, where djinn and the supernatural manifest side by side with the rest of society?! I suppose it’s my own fault for not previously familiarizing myself with P Djeli Clark’s work, tho I’m fixing to remedy that with a read of his A Dead Djinn In Cairo shortly. I just assumed The Haunting Of Tram Car 015 was set in America, and I was so pleasantly surprised to be whisked outside of this currently depressing milieu, to enjoy a fantastical tale of ghostly entities and the intrepid agents who keep them from hurting humanity.

THoTC015 follows Senior Agent Hamed al-Nasr of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities as he shows the freshly minted Agent Onsi the proverbial ropes. They’ve been assigned to investigate a reported haunting of one of the aerial tram cars that crisscross Cairo on a mix of steampunk and magic, while the city itself is in the throes of protests for woman suffrage.

It feels odd boiling the plot down to just that, when it’s such a rich novella, chock full of ideas and details and action that I felt as satisfied as if I’d read an entire novel’s worth of material. My favorite thing about it, if I had to pick just one, was the author’s ability to show how a society contains multitudes. Each named character we encounter in the book has a vivid, unique personality, and I am panting to read more. THoTC015 is just so good, and so much fun, and definitely my current favorite for the Hugo Awards 2020’s Best Novella category.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/19/the-haunting-of-tram-car-015-by-p-djeli-clark/

Jun 18 2020

Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom by Ted Chiang

Gosh, it feels kinda weird reviewing this as its own entity, but I’m still only partway through reading Exhalation, the collection it comes from, and won’t be able to finish the whole book for a while. Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom is the last story in the volume, after the also-Hugo-nominated Omphalos, with both tales providing quite different variations on the theme of alternate realities.

AitDoF follows Nat, a former addict trying to get her life back on track, and Dana, a counselor racked by feelings of guilt, as their paths intersect at a weekly meeting for prism users. Loosely speaking, a prism is a finite device that allows you to communicate with an alternate reality split off from this one — there’s a lot of quantum theorizing on how this technology works, and it makes for an interesting thought experiment, as explored in long interludes in the text. Anyway, Nat joins Dana’s group in order to run a scam dreamed up by the manager at the prism shop she works at, and finds herself in several morally questionable positions that Ted Chiang examines through the prism of, well, prisms.

On the one hand, I greatly enjoyed the tech and the people in this novella. On the other, I don’t have time for the wankery of paralysis based on how successful or otherwise your alternate reality selves are. That’s possibly a personal thing, as I was raised not to compare myself to other people but to do the right thing in the here and now. That said, I did like how the ending showed that no matter what you do, you can’t fix other people, as well as how it neatly avoided the trap of giving rich people things for free, a current societal practice that still rankles. Overall, I preferred this to Omphalos, and thought it on par with Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught, If Fortunate, another nominee for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella, but I wasn’t blown away.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/18/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freedom-by-ted-chiang/

Jun 17 2020

Season of Storms by Andrzej Sapkowski

Fourteen years after completing his multi-book Witcher Saga with The Lady of the Lake, Andzej Sapkowski returned to the world of Geralt of Rivia, not to continue the story but to add in some adventures from his hero’s early years. It’s an odd way to end the series and, perhaps, his writing career, as I do not see that he has published a book since.

Season of Storms

The alarums and excursion in Season of Storms are perfectly cromulent, but taken together they do not add much to a reader’s understanding of Geralt or the world around him. Toward the end, there are hints that Geralt will become a figure in a myth of eternal return, as was also implied in The Lady of the Lake, but other than that there is little of larger significance going on in the novel. Which is not to say that it isn’t fun — some of the close encounters with gruesome monsters are good outings for Geralt, Dandelion gets to show off both the society connections that Geralt cannot match and his poetic ego nearly getting both of them into trouble. Maybe after the multi-volume saga, Sapkowski wanted to return to simpler tales, with just a little bit of entanglement connecting them to later events.

The novel begins with Geralt rescuing part of a group of travelers from an attack by a particularly vicious lurking beast. Readers soon learn that Geralt knew they would likely be attacked and did not warn them away so that he would have a better chance of luring the monster out of its hiding places and then killing it. The tactic weighs on him; he is a killer, but not without conscience. He also tries to avoid some petty graft when settling up the contract for eliminating this particular beast, but eventually gives in. That bending of his moral code will land him in trouble not long after, although it is clear that the powers-that-be would have probably trumped up something else if they did not have this incident of corruption to harass him with.

Geralt is then in and out of jail, in and out of the employ of the local rulers, in and out of the bed of a sorceress who is not his long-time love Yennefer, in and out of a plot among wizards, and numerous other things as well. If the book does not add up to a significant addition to the Witcher canon, at least it’s enjoyable on its own terms. Season of Storms is the eighth book concerning the Witcher, and definitely not a good place to start.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/17/season-of-storms-by-andrzej-sapkowski/

Jun 16 2020

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

I think binge-reading the Monstress comic book series has seriously lowered my tolerance for earnest right now.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught, If Fortunate. The earnestness fits the message, which is a meditation on scientific ethics in regard to space travel and exploration. The novella is as uplifting, diverse and thoughtful as the rest of Ms Chambers’ work, if less funny and more science-y. It follows the four crew members of the Merian, who’ve been somatically engineered to withstand extreme differences in atmosphere and gravity as they chart the living species on each of the four extrasolar planets they’ve targeted for research. It’s a very brainy, very detail-oriented look at space, time, evolution, ethics and life itself, as well as an optimistic paean to scientific research and the human spirit.

But it’s not fun. Or at least not the kind of fun I expected after reading Ms Chambers’ excellent The Long Road To A Small, Angry Planet. TBTiF is less an entertainment than a mission statement in the form of fiction, with the occasional textbook-y interlude. I wholeheartedly enjoyed the pulpier bits, as well as the cool survival concepts but the rest of it was too nerdy even for me. YMMV, of course.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/16/to-be-taught-if-fortunate-by-becky-chambers/

Jun 15 2020

Monstress Vol. 4: The Chosen by Marjorie M. Liu & Sana Takeda

I chose to review this volume separately from the first three, due to it being nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story 2020, but I feel like I don’t have a lot to say separate from my thoughts on the preceding volumes. I feel like Monstress is a bit of an acquired taste of a series. If you dig manga-inspired tentacle monsters inhabiting a realpolitik world loosely based on early 1900s Asia, with steampunk technology and a fascinating diversity of factions/people, then you may very well enjoy this series. If you’re okay with things not being explained to you but enjoy constant novelty with pretty or grotesque things thrown onto the pages before you, then you’ll probably enjoy this series. Given my high tolerance for deep world-building and fantasy settings, as well as my partiality for diverse representation and feminist interpretations, I thought I’d enjoy this title a lot more than I do. But after Vol 4, I don’t think I’ll bother reading any more of this series, unless forced to next year by Hugo voters.

The main trouble is that as the series progresses, it gets really, really tropey. Maika is a grumpy but attractive anti-hero trying to fight the literal demon/old god inside her. She has a soft spot for Kippa, the pure-hearted and v earnest child Arcanic who’s decided to be her sidekick. In this volume, Maika discovers that her dad is as much a bastard as her mother was, and has to hit the road again as forces continue to amass, threatening war against one another when the real threat is the release of the old gods into the terrestrial realms. There’s a bunch of betrayal, a bunch of ghastly horror stuff, and just enough of Kippa and Ren’s absolutely adorable adventures to make me care about what’s going on while everyone else is V Grumpy and V Serious around them. I get it, it’s a horror/high fantasy comic, it’s not gonna be a laugh a minute, but all this dourness is just exhausting, especially when it no longer feels in service to anything new or fresh story-wise.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/15/monstress-vol-4-the-chosen-by-marjorie-m-liu-sana-takeda/

Jun 15 2020

Monstress Vol. 1-3 by Marjorie M. Liu & Sana Takeda

While reading the first volume of this series, I realized that it was going to be one of those comic book titles where you have to hang on for dear life and just enjoy the ride as events unfold and things maybe get explained along the way. The first volume, Awakening, drops you in media res as our heroine, Maika Halfwolf, goes undercover as a slave in order to infiltrate the Cumaean stronghold of Zamora. Maika is a beautiful, human-passing Arcanic whose left arm ends just below the elbow. She’s also host to a monster with a hunger for… well, honestly, I’m not sure exactly what it hungers for, whether it’s killing or blood or life essence or what. Those are the kinds of questions a comic book can skirt around by showing instead of telling, tho sometimes I feel that this series does a lot more showing than explaining at all. Anyhoo, Maika is after a witch, Yvette, who knows what happened to her mother, Moriko, and by extension herself, as Maika finds herself unable to contain the hunger of the monster within her. She figures that Yvette might have answers as to what Moriko found on a doomed expedition where, Maika believes, the monster was put into her. As Maika battles her way through and from Zamora, she picks up a child Arcanic, the adorable fox-like Kippa, as well as Ren, a cat-like double-tailed Ubasti, and learns more about the monster inside.

Vol Two, The Blood, finds Maika running toward the pirate-controlled city of Thyria in order to set sail to the Island Of Bones where her mother and Yvette had gone on their ill-fated expedition. Her expedition goes little better, as the monster inside her grows in awareness and offers itself almost as a partner to her. Maika realizes that her mom was an abusive jerk who only created her in order to grow a vessel for the monster. The forces of different interests converge in order to capture Maika and her potential for power for themselves.

In the third volume, Haven, Maika, Kippa and Ren have made it to the neutral port city of Pontus. However, if Maika can’t re-energize the shield that her ancestor, the Shaman-Empress, once built to protect the city, it’ll be open season on the inhabitants as Maika’s pursuers tear the place apart in search of her and the monstrum, Zinn, she’s carrying within her skin. To this end, she and Zinn must descend into the bowels of the city to open the Shaman-Empress’ lab, and to fight the safeguards long ago put into place to keep it sealed. Zinn remembers a lot more about himself, but not nearly enough, and as in pretty much every volume to date, horrifying shit happens.

So Monstress is a horror comic filled with grotesque images, drawn in a manga style with Western formatting. My favorite thing about Sana Takeda’s art is her gorgeous use of color, plus also Kippa (her tail hugging is the cutest!) and the way she and Ren interact. But otherwise, it’s not for me. I don’t like looking at elder gods and tentacles and a multiplicity of eyes. I’m not a huge fan of panel after panel of violence and killing. And I often feel that the pacing is off, as rando stuff happens that has me going “wait, what” or “who?!” or “why” or “how?!”

But what, you could say, did I expect from a horror story set in an alternate reality loosely based on early 1900s Asia, with steampunk technology and gods who walk among mortals? It’s definitely a cool idea, putting a neat twist on the standard hero’s quest while different races and city-states clash in bloody conflicts and mystical intrigue around her. The world-building is deep, bringing to life a milieu that is believably chaotic. I did very much enjoy the quietly subversive decision to have this be a world run by the matriarchy, with mostly women characters and leaders.

I think I would have liked the Monstress series a lot more if weren’t so uniformly humorless, tho. There are cute moments and sweet moments, but rarely moments of levity. Again, what you’d expect from a serious horror comic, but awfully hard to sustain over three volumes without making at least this reader fidget with impatience for something other than grimdark. Oh, man, the thought just occurred to me: this is like the feminine version of a Warhammer 40k novel, and not the fun Caiaphas Cain ones either. If that’s your thing, by all means, go for this. I’ve heard so much about the series that I’m glad I finally had the chance to read it (and Vol Two was definitely my favorite of the bunch so far) but it’s definitely not the kind of book I’d pick up by choice ever again. Granted, I still have to read the Hugo nominated 4th volume, and perhaps that’s more my speed. We’ll find out soon enough.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/15/monstress-vol-1-3-by-marjorie-m-liu-sana-takeda/

Jun 14 2020

München Blues by Max Bronski

Oktoberfest brings a lot of customers to Wilhelm Gossec’s this-and-that shop. The hideously overpriced merry-go-round horse in the window captures their attention, and they wind up leaving with a souvenir, an old piece of Bavarica that Gossec has snagged at an estate sale, or maybe even an oil painting artfully half hidden so that the visitors think they have made a discovery and are getting a bargain. One particular Oktoberfest evening something, or rather someone, unusual turns up outside of Gossec’s shop: a terribly drunk man who had also been beaten and robbed.

München Blues by Max Bronski

Gossec, the first-person narrator of München Blues says, “…when I see some poor sod lying there, the Boy Scout in me stirs” (p. 10) and he feels compelled to do his good deed for the day. In this case, the deed draws him into a mix of greed, violence and chicanery. According to a business card the robbers have overlooked, the poor sod who has wound up in front of Gossec’s store is Ernst Hirschböck, an important member of Bavaria’s legislature. He’s a state secretary, one level below a minister. Gossec cleans him up a bit, calls a taxi, and sends him homeward. Not, however, without also keeping something that he found on Hirschböck along with the business cards: some printed matter, a brief collection of papers.

Those turn out to be very interesting, or at least to have aroused the interest of a surprising number of people. Two men from law enforcement who decline to say just who they work for (“We’re something like Praetorians”) appear on his doorstep not two hours after he has sent Hirschböck homeward. They ask about the papers, Gossec says he only found the business cards and an invitation to an Oktoberfest event, and they perform a quick search of his shop. “When they were gone, I thought for the first time that I should have at least asked for [their] names. But probably the shy one would have called himself Maier-2 and the one in the green shirt Müller-5. Or something like that. People like that are practically born in camouflage.” (p. 15)

A couple of days later, Hirschböck’s associate Traublinger shows up. Traublinger has a buzz cut, harsh features, and bursts through the shop door with almost enough force to knock the bell off its mount. Gossec hates him on the spot. He brings Hirschböck’s thanks, along with repayment of the taxi fare plus five times that amount as a sign of gratitude, along with a personal note saying that if Gossec ever needs help, he has but to ask.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/14/munchen-blues-by-max-bronski/

Jun 13 2020

Mooncakes by Wendy Xu & Suzanne Walker

Nova is a young hearing-impaired witch of Asian-American heritage, who helps her grandmas run the Black Cat Bookstore in their small New England town. When her childhood friend, Tam, comes back to town, their return sets off a tale of magical adventure, family conflict and sweet romance.

This is a gentle, charming tale that reads as YA despite slightly older characters. Suzanne Walker writes of characters under-represented in YA fantasy with a real grounding in what magic might mean for them. I really appreciated the extra material included in the volume that explores the challenges a hearing-impaired character might have in navigating the setting’s magic system. The romance is queer but chaste, and there’s some magical violence, so it kinda feels like a shojo manga transplanted to American soil. Wendy Xu’s art reflects this, blending the best of Japanese and European comic styles, well suiting the subject matter.

Overall, a cute urban fantasy that centers minority characters, seamlessly integrating non-mainstream American lifestyles and cultures in an affirming manner. I think it would have had a more profound impact on me had I been much younger upon first encountering the book, tho.

This volume was reviewed as part of my voting slate for the Hugo Awards 2020 Best Graphic Story category.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/13/mooncakes-by-wendy-xu-suzanne-walker/

Jun 11 2020

Hugo Awards 2020: Novelette Nominees

For whatever reason, I felt that this slate wasn’t as strong as in the Short Story category, probably because I spent less time being impressed by the entries, bar the one I’m going to vote for. I mean, there weren’t any bad stories here, but I’d expect better from what’s essentially a Year’s Best list. Let’s go over the ones I won’t be voting for first.

The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed, April 2019) is fine. It’s about travel through space and time, and it’s about love and grief and first contact. It’s… fine. Competently written but hardly ground-breaking.

The Blur In The Corner Of Your Eye by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2019) is also fine. The most overtly horror-tinged of this slate of nominees, it’s about a bestselling murder mystery author and her long-suffering assistant who go out to the countryside so the author can work on her next novel. Then the author discovers a dead body, and a whole mess more. It’s a fun, gross story with an ethical dilemma at its heart but again, hardly ground-breaking.

For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, 10 July 2019) is an absolutely darling re-imagination of a chapter in the life of a real-life English poet, as seen through the eyes of his cat, Jeoffry. When my family inevitably gives in to my eldest son’s petitioning and gets a cat, I’m going to lobby to have its middle names be Nighthunter Moppet, after my favorite character in this story.

We finally get to more out-of-the-ordinary stuff with Away With The Wolves by Sarah Gailey (Uncanny Magazine: Disabled People Destroy Fantasy Special Issue, September/October 2019). A young woman whose human life is one of constant, debilitating pain finds escape in her ability to become a wolf, but suffers guilt over the very idea of escape. It’s a thoughtful allegory for what disabled people fear they “owe” society due to ableist pressures.

A thought experiment of a different kind is explored in Omphalos by Ted Chiang (Exhalation (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador)) (currently unavailable to read for free online. Legally anyway.) In a world which science can prove was Intelligently Designed, a new discovery could shake the foundations of faith for millions. So, serious question as a Muslim: who besides (some) Christians ascribes to this Intelligent Design stuff? Muslims are taught that numbers in scripture are allegorical especially in re time (i.e. God’s concept of seven days != a human concept of seven days, and it’s okay for our puny little brains to not be able to grok the scope) so the whole movement to “prove” that evolution is fake and the Earth is only several thousand years old seems incredibly naive and pointless to us. Anyway, I started out enjoying this novelette before I realized it was less a sci-fi story with faith elements and more a faith story with sci-fi elements. Definitely an original idea tho.

Finally, we come to my favorite of the bunch, Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin (Forward Collection (Amazon)). Cleverly subverting the Dying Earth trope, it’s fresh, funny and progressive, and I’m almost tempted to get the Audible version so I can hear Jason Isaacs give life to the waspish voice of the narrating AI. Everyone should read this novelette that I’m choosing as my best of 2020.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/11/hugo-awards-2020-novelette-nominees/

Jun 10 2020

LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorafor & Tana Ford

Yes, I am totally here for open border advocacy allegories, sci-fi tales that center non-white perspectives and experiences, and sly critiques of racism, overt or otherwise! Dr Freedom Chukwuebuka is five months pregnant when she abruptly leaves Lagos to return to New York City. She leaves behind a clinic where she treated both humans and aliens, primarily the plant-based florals, as well as a fiance involved in a Free Biafra movement that has skewed from protesting persecution of the Igbo to demanding a “pure” Biafran state. While Nigeria was the epicenter of alien immigration, having benefited greatly from being the point of first contact, the United States, unsurprisingly, has been far slower to embrace these intergalactic newcomers. As expected, Freedom finds herself jumping through demeaning hoops just to get back into her own country through LaGuardia International (and now Interplanetary) Airport.

Fortunately, the standard xenophobia of American immigration officials that Freedom was counting on allows her to smuggle in an illegal alien, whom she plants in the ground behind her beloved grandmother’s apartment building where she’s staying while she figures out what to do next. With no job, an estranged fiance and a baby on the way, Freedom has to navigate a whole new chapter of life… and that’s even before taking into account the complications of her alien friend being perhaps the last of its kind.

I loved the social commentary on display in this book, tho as with Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, I was perturbed by the absolutely blase way the author deals with bodily autonomy. At least in LaGuardia’s case the primary modification is accidental instead of deliberately inflicted. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel like you shouldn’t change another person’s physique without their informed consent.

The art worked well for the story, especially in depicting the humans, tho the caricature-esque style isn’t one I generally cotton to. My main complaint, with the full understanding that this might very well be a me-problem, is that expressions too often took on a sinister cast when they were supposed to be depicting glee or, usually, sarcasm. Also, the florals almost universally creeped me out, even when the plant life was entirely terrestrial.

That said, this was probably the worthiest of the stuff Ms Okarafor has written to date, primarily because of the sharp social commentary, but I’d really also like to read the last book in the Akata Witch series please! Especially with J.K. Rowling having recently gone full jackass, it’d be great to have a complete magic school series I can read without being distracted by the author’s awfulness.

This volume was reviewed as part of my voting slate for the Hugo Awards 2020 Best Graphic Story category.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/10/laguardia-by-nnedi-okorafor-tana-ford/