Aug 14 2019

The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth #1) by N.K. Jemisin

So on the one hand, this is some gorgeously written, truly imaginative sci-fi set in a world where the science seems like magic, so much so that the book reads like a terrific fantasy novel. It’s also a sharply drawn parable of slavery and gilded cages, based on inherent powers owned by people dubbed orogenes for their ability to draw kinetic and thermal energy out of their immediate surroundings, primarily to protect themselves but also to quell the constant tremors of a disquieted Earth. The orogenes, derogatorily called roggas, are taught self-control in the Fulcrums of empire, and are watched over by Guardians, who keep the orogenes’ powers in check. Non-Fulcrum orogenes are feared and often lynched by the citizens of the Sanzed empire, so Fulcrum orogenes have every incentive to stay in line.

This book begins with a non-Fulcrum orogene named Essun as she discovers that her youngest child was beaten to death by his father after he was discovered to be an orogene like she is, like she never told her husband Jija that she is. She goes in pursuit of the fleeing Jija and their daughter, Nassun, uncaring of the great calamity that has just befallen the empire. Essun’s chapters are interspersed with chapters from the point of view of a girl named Damaya, whose orogene powers have just been discovered, and a young woman named Syenite, whose ambition to rise among the ranks of fellow Fulcrum orogenes has her engaging in activities she would much prefer not to. How their paths draw together makes up the bulk of this cleverly constructed book.

So that’s one hand. On the other, I wasn’t terribly surprised by most of the plot twists, particularly regarding our three female leads. I’d also been expecting the last sentence from about halfway through the book, when N. K. Jemisin meditates on people not missing what they never knew (which I’m guessing is also what “Earth’s only begotten son” is in reference to.) And, except for his one line near the end about never being able to forgive Syenite, I hated everything about Alabaster and about how we were supposed to find him, if not outright heroic, at least noble and misunderstood. He’s a manipulative asshole who constantly undermines and belittles Syenite but it’s okay because he’s more enlightened than she is about the Fulcrum? Whereas Syenite is just a brainwashed slave to Empire who should be grateful for his friendship, no matter how he mistreats her? Fuck aaaaaaalllll that noise. I understand that hurt people hurt people but that doesn’t make them any more likeable, much less heroic. It was absolutely maddening to read how he’d fuck with her for being polite a/o deferential to him, then have him ask “Why do you hate me so much?” just a few pages later. Like, because you can’t act like an internally consistent human being? I get that he’s not “normal,” that he’s been damaged, but that’s not an excuse to be mean to people who aren’t responsible for your pain, much less pull the victim card when you sense they’re not reacting the way you want them to. So when you find out what he did, it’s just an “ugh, this asshole, of course he did.” Literally the only time I could sympathize with him was when he talked to Syenite about Corundum at the end.

I did appreciate, however, Ms Jemisin’s commitment to diversity, particularly when it came to sexuality and gender. And I’m very much looking forward to the next book, and the surprises that lie in store with the Stone Eaters. This is a truly original setting, with a lot of excellent craft shown in the telling of Essun’s story (tho, minor quibble, I thought her grief lacked the guilt that should have been tacked on after we find out what she’d done a decade earlier, or at least the self-examination of how the two events were emotionally related.) I’m hoping there’s a lot less of whiny, self-pitying Alabaster, or at least that we won’t have to treat him like a hero in the next book. There’s tragic hero flawed, like Essun, and then there’s bitchy douchebag flawed, and he’s definitely more the latter than the former.

Also, also, and I almost hate to say this because it’s hugely spoiler-tastic, I did appreciate the callback to classic African-American literature. I admit to not being overly fond of the crux of the original novel, but found it, to paraphrase what Alabaster would say, far more understandable here (even if I thought Syenite should have maybe tried the thing with her powers first and am confused as to why Corundum did not use his own powers at that juncture, tho maybe he did and it just got lost in the chaos.)

You can read Doug’s thoughts here. He’s far less nit-picky than I am about it, but he also liked the book considerably less.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/14/the-fifth-season-the-broken-earth-1-by-n-k-jemisin/

Aug 11 2019

Hexarchate Stories by Yoon Ha Lee

My review of Revenant Gun, the third in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, ended “In short, I would greatly enjoy reading more stories set within Lee’s hexarchate, or indeed either the heptarchate that preceded it or the successor states that are trying to succeed it… And no more Jedao for a while, please. He has earned his rest.” Less than a year later, Lee has published Hexarchate Stories, a collection of 21 stories, of which eighteen were previously published — twelve on the author’s blog – and three that are new to this collection.

Hexarchate Stories

There is a lot more Shuos Jedao, but contrary to my previous expectation, I didn’t mind very much. Jedao began his career in Lee’s universe as a Shuos, the faction that is closest to an intelligence service and features a predilection for games of all sorts. He then served with the military faction, the Kel, for many years, ending as their most successful general ever but also one with a penchant for unacceptable extremes. He’s one of the two most prominent characters in all three of Lee’s previous novels. By the end of the third, though, my interest in him had waned. I didn’t mind seeing him again in Hexarchate Stories for two reasons: first, most of the stories cover times when Jedao was more human and less legend, and thus more interesting; second, many of them are short short stories, and it’s easy to be charmed by something that’s little more than a single anecdote.

Lee’s good at flash fiction, and he knows it, and it shows. He seems to feel freer to play around with many different aspects of stories, and the lightness of his touch in many of them — even when the subject matter is serious — makes the hexarchate fresh even after three novels that have delved into its very heart. The variety of the stories points out one of the strengths of his overarching setting: it’s vast, and if he will let himself, he can tell many different stories, many different kinds of stories in the hexarchate’s interstellar realm. If he wishes, he can also range up and down the timeline, going back to when the polity was a heptarchate, or forward to a time after the changes set in motion by Kel Cheris back in Ninefox Gambit. Though the flash fictions are short, they are by no means slight. When they’re about Jedao, they show previously unknown aspects of his tale, and they tend toward humanizing him. When they are not about Jedao, they illuminate something new about the hexarchate, or are there for the sheer joy of playing around with words and ideas. They don’t have to bear much weight; consequently, they lift up the reader.

In his author’s notes, Lee mentions that several of the short shorts that appeared on his blog were commissioned works. That’s an interesting point about the business of writing in the twenty-first century. One of an author’s revenue streams can be money that comes directly from fans. There need not be intermediaries between writers and their audiences. On the other hand, it also points toward the precariousness of writing for a living, where 6¢ to 9¢ per word is considered a professional rate. By contrast, when I was a commissioning editor more than ten years ago, New York PR writers tried to get $2 per word from me. Six to nine cents per word is a hobby, not a profession. I’m glad that Lee has found more ways to support his writing, and even more glad that the stories from his blog have been collected into a book that’s available for purchase in a brick and mortar bookstore.

Hexarchate Stories was a welcome set of glimpses into other tales within Lee’s star-spanning setting. It reminded me how much I like a well-crafted science fiction anthology, and it left me looking forward to still more stories from the hexarchate. (But I also mean it about less late-period Jedao. He breaks the setting, and I don’t find him all that interesting.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/11/hexarchate-stories-by-yoon-ha-lee/

Aug 10 2019

An Informal History of the Hugos by Jo Walton

I remember enjoying these assessments of the Hugo Awards when they first appeared as columns on Tor.com, and I am glad to see them collected in book form with the addition of selected comments that appeared in the discussion that followed each column. The subtitle of this collection — A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards, 1953–2000 — relates the book’s remit about as succinctly as possible. The book is in some sense the obverse of her collection of reviews, What Makes This Book So Great. That volume started with individual books and sometimes veered into reflections on where they fit within an author’s career, within the history of larger movements in literature, or in trends that were popular at the time. This volume starts with each year and considers works within it, only occasionally delving deeply into an individual publication. Though the Hugo Awards have embraced many different categories over the years, Walton concentrates on written fiction; indeed, she thinks that in many years the Hugos would have been better off without the Dramatic Presentation category (or, later, categories) at all.

An Informal History of the Hugos

For each year from 1953 to 2000, she concentrates on the Best Novel category and considers the winners and nominees (once those started becoming known after the award had been running for several years), whether they have had a lasting effect on the field, whether they were in fact the best novels of their respective years, and what books the voters and nominators might have overlooked. As the years went on, more science fiction and fantasy awards were given, and Walton also looks at their nominees and winners as ways of gauging the field as a whole, and whether the Hugo voters were in step with other readers, juries, and voters. To those considerations of the years, she has added slightly more than two dozen essays that examine individual works. Finally, the original posts on Tor.com drew comments, and Walton reproduces a number of them after each annual summary. Two of the commenters who appear the most are Rich Horton and Gardner Dozois, themselves significant figures within the field (Dozois, for example, edited Asimov’s for 20 years and won 15 Hugos for editing over that span, and also won two Nebulas for his short fiction). The comments are also reminders that science fiction and fantasy are not large fields, and that editorial titans are just as human as their readers:

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/10/an-informal-history-of-the-hugos-by-jo-walton/

Aug 10 2019

Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon

Conversations on Writing grew from three sets of discussions between Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon for the Oregon radio station KBOO. She completed her introduction to this volume less than four months before her death in January 2018; Naimon wrote his not quite two weeks after her passing, it’s a touching valediction. “I look again at Ursula’s [edits]—her enthusiastic yes!, her matter-of-fact I disagree. In these gestures I see how fully present she is, how completely she attends to the task at hand, and I realize that nothing is too small to contain the whole world, to bring forth Ursula’s powerful, opinionated, captivating self.” (pp. vi–vii)

Conversations on Writing

Over the course of her storied career, Le Guin had many interviews, and her introduction is about how one learns quickly to tell the enjoyable from the excruciating, with a quick segue to how enlightening her talks with Naimon were. “A couple of sessions with Bill Moyers set my permanent standard of The Good Interview. It’s the one you wish could go on. It’s a conversation between people who have thought about what they’re talking about, and are thinking about it now in the light of what the other person is saying. This leads each of them to say things that they may be just discovering. They may not agree, may even have quite fundamental disagreements, but such differences, spoken and answered without belligerence, can take the conversation to a high level of intensity and honesty.” (p. 4) Long ago when I was a bookseller, I had the pleasure of a lunch with Moyers, and I can only agree and add that he had a remarkable recollection of the people he had talked with. I brought up a group of plumbers who he had mentioned in his introduction to The World of Ideas 2, and he was off and running about this group who had stumbled onto the first set of talks that formed The World of Ideas. It was exactly how Le Guin describes an interview that is going well, “The good interview is like a good badminton rally: you know right away that the two of you can keep that birdie in the air, and all you have to do is watch it fly.” (p. 5)

With Naimon, she adds one more key feature: “And every now and then I meet one who realizes that what I really like to do is talk shop. David likes talking shop too. So that’s what we did.” (p. 6)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/10/conversations-on-writing-by-ursula-k-le-guin-and-david-naimon/

Aug 09 2019

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

For the epigraph to Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Robson riffs on the old saying about the past being a foreign country. Instead of “they do things differently there” she has “we want to colonize it.” That’s the first indication that her novella will eventually be a time-travel story. The next is the abrupt shift between a three-paragraph opening scene that features a mythical tone, with a monster that “looked like an old grandmother from the waist up, but it had six long octopus legs,” followed by scenes in a semi-distant future Calgary with “plague babies” who have worked together for more than 60 years, and “fakes” that are something like computer-generated avatars with a generous helping of AI. No wait, the second clue that this is going to be a time-travel story is that after the monster recoils and hisses when the king appears to do battle, it says Oh-shit-shit-shit-shit.

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach

It doesn’t take readers long to learn that Minh, Robson’s main point of view character for the future scenes, has the same number of limbs as the monster that the king Shulgi is battling in those initial three paragraphs. How will their worlds collide? (Presuming, of course, that the number of appendages is not a coincidence.) That’s one of the main throughlines of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach. Minh’s future world is a bleak one, though from Robson’s descriptions, not as bleak as its recent past. In Minh’s world’s history, total ecological collapse drove humanity to live underground for generations; most people live there still. Minh is one of a relatively small number of people who live in “habs,” attempting to recolonize the surface of the Earth.

In the interim, humanity has developed serious biological modification technology, of which Minh’s extra legs are the story’s most prominent example. During the course of the tale, one of the characters undergoes radical transformation to prove a point; that illustrates how routine this technology has become. And of course there’s time travel, whose workings have been kept hush-hush by the CERN-like agency that developed it. (The agency is even called TERN.) That keeps the traveling sufficiently vague for modern sensibilities but not impossible, because otherwise it would be very difficult indeed to write a time-travel story. I don’t quite buy Robson’s setting — the desertification that she has her characters trying to mitigate would, I think, be impossible to recover from, and ecological catastrophe bad enough to drive the human species underground would also suffice to kill it — but I am willing to roll with it for the sake of the story.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/09/gods-monsters-and-the-lucky-peach-by-kelly-robson/

Aug 09 2019

An Anatomy of Beasts (Faloiv #2) by Olivia A Cole

Hurray, work finally calmed down enough again for me to read a library book!

After the events of the first book in the series (that you should really read before picking up this one,) our heroine Octavia is on the run from the rest of the humans of N’Terra. She finds refuge with the Faloii, the native inhabitants of the planet, who are harboring both refugees and secrets that will gradually be uncovered as the book heads to its curiously moving ending. It’s the kind of ending that feels complete even as you want to know what happens next: I’d love to read more books in the series, but if it ends right here, I won’t feel at all unsatisfied (tho very much want to read more of Olivia A Cole’s work.)

I can’t really talk about the plot without giving away a ton of spoilers, as so much happens. What I can say is that the predatory ecosystem of the planet finally made sense to me in this book, and the strictures against meat-eating took on even more significance. I was less enthused about the way the Faloii dismissed intent, but I suppose their capacity for tolerance was understandably limited at that point in the novel. Sometimes, I didn’t really understand why Octavia made the choices she did as to where to go next on her journey; it was a bit chaotic, but in a good way. That said, it was a great journey, especially with the subtle way Ms Cole draws parallels between what Octavia encounters and the way colonizers have historically engaged with new lands and peoples. The book is also an excellent exploration of racial guilt and belonging and the many tools oppressors use to keep dissenters in line, all clothed in a YA sci-fi novel.

If you want genuinely inventive sci-fi that boldly explores the nature of colonialism and oppression, this is definitely the series for you, as it is for me. I’m hoping for a sequel, but would be happy just to be able to read more of Ms Cole’s writing. She’s a fresh talent with a lot to say about the structures of power, and a pretty darn good sci-fi author to boot.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/09/an-anatomy-of-beasts-faloiv-2-by-olivia-a-cole/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/04/artificial-condition-by-martha-wells/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/03/binti-the-night-masquerade-by-nnedi-okorafor/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/27/binti-home-by-nnedi-okorafor/