In Praise of Motherland: Fort Salem

 

I'm pausing my book reviews for a moment to talk about this show. It airs on Freeform/Hulu (the former on Tuesdays, the streamer the next day). I had heard of it previously, in a vague yes-I-know-this-exists way, but I hadn't really paid any attention to it. That changed when the author Kameron Hurley, one of my "must-read" writers, started tweeting about it:

So I gave it a look. And damn, that show sucked me right in....starting with the opening credits.

It's pretty rare that opening credits, as short as they tend to be for series nowadays, contribute much to the overall feel of a show beyond a logo and a bit of music. This one gives you glimpses into an entire alternate history of America. It shows:

1) The witches' power and magic comes from their vocal cords;

2) The break with our history comes with a document called the "Salem Accords," from 1692, that "any child born of a witch shall deliver herself bodily to Fort Salem";

3) We have paintings of the witches fighting in the Revolutionary War, not with weapons but with mouths open, singing their magic;

4) There's a painting of one of the main characters, General Alder, aping George Washington at the Crossing of the Delaware;

5) We see an entirely different map of the United States, with 30 states instead of the continental 48, and a wide strip of land dividing the country from the Canadian Border to the Gulf of Mexico--including what would have been Louisiana--called the "Cession"; 

6) We see the several "lines" of witch families, including what will be familiar names such as Bellweather;

7) And at the end, a different U.S. flag, with a witch's pentagram (presumably 30 of them, to match the numbers of states) instead of our 50 stars. 

All of this in a minute and three seconds. 

This is the painting in referenced in #4:

I don't want to give too many plot points away, but I will say that the women pictured here play an important part in the General's arc. They're called the Biddies, and in this show it's not a disparaging term. Although the reason they're there is pretty creepy...but you'll have to watch the show to find out what it is. 

This show focuses on three young women, Tally Craven, Abigail Bellweather, and Raelle Collar, who at age eighteen are conscripted into the U.S. Army. Needless to say, with the existence of magic, technology has changed quite a bit from our world: there aren't any smart phones, for instance. And I don't remember seeing a computer anywhere. There are cars, and television, so maybe the broad strokes of the Industrial Revolution followed the same general lines in this alternate history. But none of this is infodumped, and the worldbuilding evolves gradually as it's required for the plot. 

The first thing that strikes you as you watch this is....there are so many women. So many female characters: the President is a black woman, for instance, and most of the other heads of state are also female. The overwhelming majority of witches are women, and the witch lines are kept track of on the female side. This leads to what I suppose is a bit of a matriarchy, and polyamory and queerness are accepted as well. (Raelle, for instance, has a female lover--Scylla--and no one thinks twice about it. Abigail has three fathers--or at least three men in her mother's household, all of them sharing parenting duties--and during one of the Season 1 episodes she is shown having sex with two boys. At the same time.) There are also many women of color and older women in the cast. Which would not matter if these women were not well-developed characters, but they are. Tally is the naive idealist who has had her illusions shattered over the course of the show's two seasons; Abigail begins Season 1 as a privileged snob, a scion of the famed Bellweather line who needs to learn a bit of humility; and Raelle is the outsider searching for the reasons behind her mother's death and not at all pleased to be paired with Abigail (especially after Abigail calls her a "shitbird"). Seeing these three overcome their differences and bond is one of the best things about the series.

One of the most complex characters on the show is General Sarah Alder, the three-hundred-plus-year-old witch who negotiated the original Salem Accords. As you can imagine, the General has fought a lot of wars and done a lot of things, and a great many of them are....not good. Alder's past plays a pivotal role in Season 2, and her actions basically created the Season 1 antagonist, the Spree. Again, this is gradually revealed and has obviously been planned out from the start. 

I really love this show. It is getting a third season, which will sadly be its last. There is a Change.org petition, which I have signed, trying to rescue the program for further seasons. In the meantime, I encourage anyone reading this to give it a try. There's really nothing else out there like it. 

Review: The Echo Wife

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars 

(I don't usually put spoilers on these, but this one is justified in having a spoiler warning, I think. 

SPOILERS AHOY)

This book inspired a reaction I don't think I've ever had before: a compelling read that I didn't want to put down....and I don't think I'll ever read again.

This is not an easy read by any means. It's a little bit psychological thriller, an exploration of gaslighting and domestic violence and how it's handed down from generation to generation, a discussion of the scientific ethics of personhood, the unpacking of the unfair expectations society puts on professional women/wives, and the extrapolation of the full-fledged societal upheavals viable cloning would bring. It's a heady stew, wrapped around one of the most obsessed, unlikeable, and fascinating protagonists I've ever read. Not that protagonists need to be likable, of course. This one definitely isn't, but she commands the story on every page, down to the shiver-inducing ending.

The tone is set from the very first paragraph.

My gown was beautiful. It was the kind of garment that looks precisely as expensive as it is. I did not hate it, because it was beautiful, and I did not love it, because it was cruel. I wore it because wearing it was the thing this night demanded of me.

As I read the first few pages, I thought, "This person is wound so tightly she's about to break." Sometimes I wondered which of the characters would break first: Evelyn Caldwell, the narrator, who discovers her husband has been having an affair with Evelyn's own clone, Martine; Martine, the woman created to be the perfect version of a wife, the wife Evelyn could not be; and Nathan, Evelyn's husband, the epitome of restrained, toxic masculinity that created and murdered twelve other versions of Martine before coming up with the ideal, pliant, agreeable clone of Evelyn that wanted nothing more than to stay at home, be a mother, and tend to Nathan's every need. 

I suppose Nathan was the character who broke first, after Martine spoke up to him for the first time, asking him what would happen if she didn't want to be a mother. (She has just discovered she's pregnant, which is the incident that sets the entire plot in motion. Evelyn didn't create her clones to be fertile; they're just intended to be temporary, disposable things, serving their purpose and then terminated.) Nathan flies into a rage and tries to strangle Martine; she kills him in self-defense and calls Evelyn in a panic. Evelyn comes over, and realizing she has to hide both Nathan's death and Martine's existence to save her career, helps Martine bury the body in the back yard.

(Gardens and back yards play a large part in this story; as the slow, restrained horror of Evelyn's childhood unfolds, the reader learns the full meaning of the William Faulkner quote, which is terrifyingly apropos to this story: "The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity." Returning to the theme of generational abuse, Evelyn's father was also an abuser and manipulator who beat his wife, terrorized the household, broke his daughter's wrist and was subsequently killed by Evelyn's mother and buried in her mother's garden. Evelyn is never able to leave the ghost of her father behind, which ties into the unsettling ending, where she's living with Martine and Martine's daughter, Violet. She may not be physically abusing Martine, at least not yet, but she's sounding more and more like her father every day. It's one of the creepiest endings I've read in a long time.)

From that point on, the angry, obsessed wife and the naive young lover are caught up in a tangled web they are never able to free themselves from. Evelyn makes a few brief attempts to develop a conscience and ultimately backs away from doing so; Martine tries to break out of her programming and in the end gives in to it for the sake of her daughter; and the clone of Nathan, which Evelyn and Martine create to hide the original's death, cannot cope with the thing he thought he wanted, a baby, and dumps the child on Evelyn (and Martine, who he thinks is dead and doesn't know is living with his ex-wife). These are three fucked-up people....but you can't look away from them.

(I can't imagine what that household will be like as Violet gets older. I hope Sarah Gailey doesn't ever write a sequel to this book, because I doubt I would be able to bring myself to read it.)

It takes real skill to write such a dark, twisted story as this, and make it so readable and compelling. For the most part, the writing is low-key and restrained, which makes for an even harder gut punch. It requires a great deal of intestinal fortitude from the reader...but if you can cope with it, it's a helluva story.

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Review: Siege of Rage and Ruin

Siege of Rage and Ruin by Django Wexler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This last book of the Wells of Sorcery trilogy does a fine job of wrapping things up. One would hope this would be the case, of course, but I found this third book to be a satisfying, well-executed ending, with good payoffs for both the characters and the world.

The core of this book, and indeed the entire trilogy, is the relationship between the sisters Isoka and Tori. The first book is told from Isoka's POV, which is appropriate as the two are separated for the entire narrative. In the second, Tori's story is picked up, which adds greatly to the series. This continues in the third book, alternating chapters of Isoki and Tori and the showdown with the antagonist in their home city of Kahnzoka.

This is a young adult fantasy with a fairly innovative magic system. The only thing that creeped me out was Tori's sorcerous power, Kindre, the Well of Mind. She can manipulate people mentally, and during her fight against Kahnzoka's oppressive class system she creates a network of people called the Blues, which are basically her mind slaves. Of course this is a horrendous violation, and though Tori calls herself a monster, Isoka all but brushes it off as "doing what you must with what you have." Isoka has killed a great many people with her Well, Melos, the Well of Combat, which includes (among other things) green swords of power emerging from her wrists. Still, this seems like a pretty clean death compared to what Tori is doing, and that whole concept needed to be rethought a bit, I think.

But the overall worldbuilding is well-thought-out and interesting, and the sisters Gelmei both show some nice character growth. The ending concludes the story in a satisfying manner, with the sisters taking the survivors of Kahnzoka, including the mistreated mage-born, aboard their gigantic ghost ship Soliton and away from the city altogether, never to return. (Although I would have loved to learn more about the "ancients" who created both Soliton and the Wells of Sorcery. This series is fantasy, but the little we got of this world's backstory had a definite SF feel to it.) I read a lot of YA, and this is definitely one of the better series of recent years.

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Review: Engines of Oblivion

Engines of Oblivion by Karen Osborne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second book of the Memory War duology, expanding on last year's Architects of Memory. The first thing you notice is that this is a fatter book than the first; the second thing is that the protagonist has shifted, with a secondary character, Natalie Chan, taking the lead this time around. The reason for this is soon made clear. Natalie is tasked by the corporation she was recently granted citizenship to, Aurora, to find and bring in Ashlan Jackson, the protagonist of the first book who has a tie with the alien hivemind species the Vai. 

I'm usually not fond of cyberpunk/consciousness upload stories, because current science says such a thing is impossible. Consciousness, as I understand it, is generated by the 100 billion neurons in the gray jelly inside our heads, and can't be separated from the actual physical brain. Having said that, the fact that this form of consciousness transfer is based on an alien species' technology makes the premise a little more palatable. Also, Karen Osborne has improved as a writer since the first book. The characterization, in particular, is much better in this volume, and the theme of deconstructing capitalism (in the form of the all-encompassing Corporate Alliance which has apparently swallowed up all this future's world governments) is even more prominent. 

The plot is denser and better constructed, and this is just a weightier book, both in terms of page count, theme and tone. It's nice to see a new author begin to hit her stride. This augurs well for the next book, but in the meantime, this one is worth your time. 

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Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow by Mariko Tamaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a likable enough story, but it was rather slight. It's from the ongoing Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot, where the story is updated to include cell phones and exclude Joss Whedon. I've read the first two new graphic novels, and this miniseries takes off from a defining incident in the first volume, where Xander is turned into a vampire and Willow gives him a piece of her soul.

So far, the characters seem to be handled better than the series' live-action heyday. This was focused on Willow, in recovery from the aforementioned incident. She takes time away from Sunnydale to study abroad, but when she comes back to the States she is still unable to return home and face a life without Xander. So she buys a one-way bus ticket to anywhere and hits the road instead. She falls into a cozy, isolated little town called Abhainn, which is apparently populated entirely by witches. Willow develops a crush on the leader of the coven, Aelara, and thinks about staying permanently. Of course, we know neither Abhainn or Aelara is what they seem, and Willow has to fight her way out of the town when Aelara tries to prevent her from leaving. The conflict, such as it is, is solved at the end by a talk and a hug, and Willow promises to return if Abhainn needs her.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be a linkage back to the overall storyline or a temporary side trip, but either way, it doesn't seem to have much punch. I'm only rating it as high as I have because of the art. (Although I wish Jen Bartels could have drawn the entire comic instead of just the covers. Her covers nearly have more personality than the entire book.) It's nice to get some focus on Willow, but I wish this story could have carried a little more weight.

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Review: Victories Greater Than Death

Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book's over-the-top nature is made clear from the cover onward: the title is a repeated phrase of the main character and one of the book's themes. I appreciate the author making clear what sort of book you're getting: a big, bold, brassy, young adult takeoff/satire of superhero/space opera movies. This is Guardians of the Galaxy minus Groot, Rocket Raccoon (though there is a fox character with a symbiotic fur controlling their murderous instincts that is a sort of stand-in) and the killer soundtrack, plus varying amounts of teenaged angst. Whether you like this book will depend on your tolerance of these elements. It fell very much in the middle for me. It's also suffering from "Muddled Middle" syndrome, which seems to be this author's habit, and the so-called "science" is not worth mentioning, engendering many rolled eyes from me. The ending tied things together well enough to make it an okay read, and it's certainly better than the last book I read from this author. But I think if I tackle the sequel (which is a pretty big "if" at this point) I'll get it from the library.

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Review: Chaos on CatNet

Chaos on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the sequel to last year's award-winning Catfishing on CatNet, which I reviewed here. The protagonist from the previous book, Steph, her mother, and the artificial intelligence CheshireCat are back for another round, but this book is not a retread of the first. It introduces some intriguing new characters and takes the story in what I thought was an interesting direction.

The focus of this book is still on artificial intelligence gaining an ethical and moral outlook, but the emphasis is on choice, as in an AI's being able and allowed to make one. It also focuses on a near future only slightly different from our own, with often alarming things to say about how the internet, apps and social media can be used to mislead and manipulate people, as effectively as any cult leader. In fact, a second AI introduced in this book is more or less just that--a cult leader used by a renegade programmer in an attempt to cause chaos and war in society, in the name of a religious cult looking for (and maybe looking to start) the Tribulation.

Now that Steph and her mother are free from her stalker father, the two are able to settle in Minneapolis and live a somewhat normal life (at least as normal as a teenage girl with an artificial intelligence best friend can). Steph meets a new girl, Nell, at her school, and strikes up a friendship. Nell is also an outsider, a refugee from the cult the Abiding Remnant, taken in by her father (and her father's polyamorous household, with a stepmother and girlfriends she amusingly calls Things One, Two and Three). Nell, like Steph, is gay. She carries a lot of guilt over her orientation due to the cult's teachings, and she is trying to get in touch with the girlfriend, Glenys, she left behind.

Steph wants to help Nell, and she and CheshireCat end up being pulled into a web of deception, kidnapping, and societal upheaval, all orchestrated by the cult and the AI that is pulling its strings. We find out the second AI is actually a knockoff of CheshireCat, in an earlier iteration, and at the climax Steph's mother (a master programmer) is tasked with removing the "kill switch" from Boom Storm, the second A.I. (This is one of the things I liked about this book. The teenagers aren't unrealistically smarter and more competent than the adults, and Steph's mother has to reprogram the second A.I. and allow it to make its own choice not to hurt people.) In between, there is a lot of running and hiding in Minneapolis in the dead of winter, in a nicely paced thriller with steadily escalating stakes.

As always, CheshireCat is one of my favorite characters. They remain the optimistic, bouncy young person with an often naive innocence, loyal to their friends, still gaining experience about the world. They also have a great deal of power and are not averse to using it, in a reminder of the many potential flaws in our increasingly interlinked society--and even more so in this future, set a handful of years away (albeit with a lot more robots than I think we will have this decade).

To let off some steam, I return to the eight residential programs running conversion therapy [an unethical and pseudoscientific practice of trying to change gay people's sexual orientation], deactivate their antivirus software, and download the five most destructive computer viruses I know of onto all their computers that are connected to the internet. Maybe this will help a few people like Glenys, even if I can't help Glenys right now.

Steph, Nell and CheshireCat are the three rotating POV characters, which serves to open up the world nicely. This series showcases the strength of friendship and the importance of gaining an ethical outlook and being able to make one's own choices. (Since it's set in Minneapolis, it's also an unwitting commentary on policing and Black Lives Matter protests. The author says she wrote Minneapolis how she hopes to see it: "Steph, of course, refers to anyone in uniform as a 'cop'--but one reason there's such a dramatic contrast between the aggressive bullies working in law enforcement who appear in Catfishing on CatNet and the gentle concern that she encounters here is that this is what I want to see--people who approach problems to solve them rather than who approach citizens to subdue them.") There's a lot going on here under the surface, besides being an exciting and satisfying story, and it's definitely for adults who appreciate the social commentary science fiction can bring.

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Review: The Fallen

The Fallen by Ada Hoffmann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the sequel to The Outside, a book I rated five stars a couple of years ago. This series takes place in a far future where humanity has been conquered by their own quantum supercomputers, which have made themselves into the human race's rulers and gods. This is complicated by the existence of the Outside, an extradimensional source of Lovecraftian-style energy and physics-twisting cosmic horror that the first book's protagonist, Yasira Shien, invites into our universe.

This book deals with the fallout and consequences of that decision. It's concentrated on the planet Jai and its Chaos Zone, ground zero for the Outside invasion, where strange plants grow, monsters walk, the normal laws of physics are turned inside out, and the fifth of the planet and its inhabitants under the Outside's sway are struggling to survive. In a way, it's refreshing to have the stakes of this book be relatively contained and small-scale. Although I'm sure Yasira and her friends' confrontation with the Gods are coming. But apparently that will wait till the next book.

In the meantime, we have Yasira trying to cope with what happened and found a revolution. Yasira is on the autism spectrum, and the fallout from the first book (and the Outside energy that remains within her, that she can draw upon and use) damaged her brain, turning her into a "plural"--the current term for what was once called multiple personality/disassociative identity disorder. This plays an important part of the plot and climax. Yasira's plurality allows her to carry out the revolution that frees Jai and its people from the Gods' control (although the last chapter shows that the Gods' enemy, the Keres, is on their way to Jai, setting up what will presumably be the third book).

The only reason I haven't rated this book five stars instead of four is because it has multiple point of view characters, and I'm not fond of that style of narrative. That's a personal quirk. In this case, however, multiple POVs are necessary to the story, and the new characters we spend time with are well drawn and interesting, particularly Elu Ariehmu. Elu is the follower of Akavi Averis, the renegade "angel" (cyborg soldiers and enforcers of the Gods) cast out in the first book. Elu has a rather heartbreaking character arc in this book, and I hope he gets a happy ending in the next.

We also get some welcome and fascinating backstory for this universe, via a visit to Old Earth to see a museum that depicts the Morlock War, a failed rebellion hundreds of years before. This book is not necessarily the tale of a second Morlock War (at least not yet), but it does show how a community fundamentally fragmented and altered can adjust, come together and cooperate to fight anew...and maybe win, at least for a little while. It's a layered, complex tale that gives the reader a great deal to think about. I only hope next time around we get to see the Gods themselves.

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Review: Unity

Unity by Elly Bangs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an incredibly ambitious book for a first novel. (In the Afterward the author says she's been working on it off and on for eighteen years.) Whether it's successful in that ambition is a different question. I think overall it's well-written with engaging characters and some rather depressing worldbuilding.

I suppose whether you like this book depends on whether you can cope with the elements of said worldbuilding. This book is set in a future a hundred and forty years from now, when climate change is in full swing. The seas have risen, the continents are scorched, and most of the human species has moved into undersea cities. Governments and countries are fractured and broken, the United States is a distant memory, and the undersea cities are, for the most part, ruled by criminal warlords. Our protagonist, Danae, is desperate to leave her undersea world, Bloom City. She has a time limit to meet up with what she calls the Unity, the nanotech-powered gestalt consciousness she severed herself from five years earlier. This book is the story of her quest to reunite with the rest of herself, the different factions that are after her, and the philosophical discussions as to whether a post-singularity unified consciousness is, or should be, the future of humanity.

At the end, the book seems to be saying that the answer to that question should be "yes":

You know who I am. I'm Danae, with all the 223 lives whose combined memory and experiences amounted to her consciousness--and I am Alexei, with all the lives he took. I'm more than the sum of those parts: I am all the things neither of them were capable of doing, or being, or realizing, as long as they were separate; connections they couldn't make, thoughts too complex to fit inside a single head, emotions too vast to pump through the chambers of one heart.
...

But I know things, too. When I turn the Whole's parting gift between my palms and focus, they all bloom so vividly in my mind: the innermost workings of cells and molecules and subatomic particles, the comprehensible language of all matter and energy and motion; the most basic foundational principle to the most chaotic emergent quality. I know how to cure the plagues and halt the famines. I know how to turn the sky blue again.

I think I know how to heal this dying world.

There's only one hope I carry with me now: that I could be the right person to do it. I've maimed and killed, feared and hated--but I have also loved, rescued, protected, created, and given birth. I contain everything that is human--and finally, after everyone I've been, none of it is beyond my understanding. Because I am understanding. I am unity.

The being referenced in this excerpt, the Whole, is at the end, Danae's primary antagonist. It is what remained of the initial Unity after she severed herself from it. After deliberately killing a person, Danae believed she could never, and should never, be accepted by the Unity again (and the only reason she is making the journey is to let her lover, Naoto, join the Unity instead). In the intervening five years, the Unity grew to a godlike being that was prepared to let swarms of unleashed nanotech destroy the world and create a better one from the grey goo that remained. Because it considered itself to be superior.

The Whole scoffed. "We are objectively better than separate people. We can say this without ego. Even you, apart from me, are vastly more capable and more intelligent than any un-unified individual who has ever lived."

At the last, Danae uses the only thing she has to defeat the Whole--her guilt and remorse over the murder she committed. Because you are me, she says, and I have killed. So you have no business murdering the human race, or letting them die, because you are no different than them.

In the book, this gambit works. But this is the part of the worldbuilding that turned me off, because the entire idea of the Unity, or the Whole, is the creepiest goddamn thing ever. In a way, it's set up as a sort of benign, wholesome--well, maybe not wholesome, but at least non-aggressive--Borg from Star Trek. What could possibly go wrong?



So I think this is a marmite book. I kinda-sorta liked it, but it gave me the heebie-jeebies. However, there's no denying the author's talent, to come up with something like this. I hope her next book doesn't take eighteen years; but I also hope it goes in some other non-Unified direction.

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Review: A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler

A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler by Lynell George
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was a bit disappointed with this book, but that's possibly because I had unrealistic expectations for it. I knew it was far too short to be a comprehensive biography, but I was hoping to get a bit more detail about Butler's life and how she wrote her books. There is some of both of those topics in this book, but it seems for the most part to be shallow and quickly skimmed over. Octavia E. Butler is crying out for an in-depth biography and analysis of her work, and I hope someday she gets one. This isn't it.

(Actually this is probably more what I'm thinking of.)

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