Review: Foundling Fathers

Foundling Fathers by Meg Elison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This story is an SF cloning story with a "d," with the Founding Fathers re-created Jurassic Park style in our time, hence the titular Foundling Fathers. It's also a novella, which means that the book is too short for the author to get into the nitty-gritty of how this was done--presumably digging up their bones to extract their DNA? That mystery is left unsolved, and for very good reason: it's not the author's focus and point. This story is a sometimes vicious satire and skewering of the myth of American exceptionalism (sorry, there is nothing "exceptional" about a country built on slavery and genocide, a country that refuses to reckon with its bloody past to this day), as well as the people who are trying to bring back an idealized past that never existed.

Our titular protagonists are four teenaged clones of the Founding Fathers: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, raised on an island off the coast of Virginia in total ignorance of the modern world. They think it is the year 1750. Everyone around them is forced by non-disclosure agreements to go along with this fantasy, and the pre-Revolutionary War culture and level of technology is painstakingly re-created--even down to the servants, who appear to be undocumented immigrants forced into this little charade. The women in particular are denied modern birth control. This, of course, plays right into the hands of one Thomas Jefferson, who is just as much of a rapist in his second incarnation as he was in his first.

The four boys are sharply and expertly drawn for as short as this book is. It also features one of the best opening lines I've read in a while, right up there with "It was a pleasure to burn" and "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel":

"It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet."

This revelation comes via a cell phone left in the privy by the boys' mother--or at least the woman who carried and bore all of them, which isn't quite the same thing. This sets off a chaotic twenty-four hours in which the boys discover their entire lives are based on lies, and the world out there has advanced more than two hundred and fifty years beyond them. When the servants have finally had enough of being imprisoned on this island, break into the armory and start shooting, the boys manage to escape on the supply ship. They are abruptly dumped into the modern world, and meet up with the narcissistic billionaire who financed their cloning, where they are told why they were made:

"And that's why you need us to lead," Jefferson said. "That's been taught to us all our lives. And also the lie that's been fed to us. We are the founders of the past; not the builders of the future. You need us so that you can reverse the arrow of time."

"We need that. Desperately," Stephens said, turning to face Jefferson. "That's it exactly. We have to go back. We must regain the vision we've lost. We need you to lead, and it's got to be now."

"You want us to change this country," Washington said slowly, "by deriving power from the way it is now. Remake it in the way it was made before, some three hundred years ago. But you want us to do it in the way that you tell us to. Because we're special and we can do it in a special, very old way. Because we've been bred from preserved stock like so many showhorses. And you think we won't refuse because of benefits we've never been shown, in a country we've never properly lived in, and have been lied to about every day of our lives. Does that make any sense to you, Tom?"

Needless to say, that does not work out. The reader ends up feeling sympathy and pity for these poor kids, born into a strange world they know nothing about, bred to spearhead some egomaniacal billionaire's revolution against all the progress made in those two hundred fifty years. (And at the end, we find out he has more clones ready to go, another fresh batch to replace these "duds.") The ending is rather a downer, as you realize there is a non-zero number of people in this country, some of them in the higher echelons of government, who want to return this country to its mythical founding hierarchy, when white land-owning males were on top and everyone else knew their place.

This gives you a very uneasy feeling as you close the back cover, which is exactly what the author intended. Maybe it's a good thing the book is short, as it could easily have descended into a dystopian horrorshow. But the broad, brief sketches of what she draws here are more than enough.


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Review: Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This second book in the Emily Wilde fantasy series continues the saga of Professor Wilde, dryadologist who studies the many species of fae, and her fellow professor/secret exiled king of Faerie Wendell Bambleby. This could also be called a "cosy" fantasy series (although this storyline gets a bit dark), with a focus on the science of dryadology in this alternate universe where faeries and alternate realms exist.

The highlight of the series is the prickly, sometimes hilarious relationship between the rational, matter-of-fact Emily and the fussy, eccentric (and often terrifying, when he lets his Faerie powers loose) Wendell. Wendell is trying to find a back door to return to his kingdom, and his evil stepmother has sent assassins after him. Wendell has also asked Emily to marry him, which prospect occupies a good deal of the plot because, as Emily says, marrying a Faerie king would be most unwise. Nevertheless, I suppose love in the end does conquer all, as she agrees to marry him, in between her efforts to open a door into his realm and the various hijinks that ensue.

These books are quite charming. The author hadn't been on my radar before, but now I am trying to track her books down. That's one of the great delights of reading, when you stumble upon someone you never heard of before and realize their books are right up your alley. If you like something along the lines of Marie Brennan's Memoirs of Lady Trent, this series is similar and worth checking out as well.

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Review: Ode to the Half-Broken

Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Suzanne Palmer has written several award-winning stories, including the Hugo Award-winning "The Secret Life of Bots." Many of her stories involve robots and artificial intelligence, and she excels at depicting nonhuman characters. I've read and enjoyed several of her stories, but I haven't sought out her novels--until now. The quality of this story is such that she gets bumped up to my "auto-buy" list.

This book is loaded with nonhuman characters. It's in a near-future setting, about forty years from now when a combination of environmental collapse, war, famine, and pandemics (both natural and, as we find out, artificial) have reduced the human population to a billion. A post-collapse society is in the process of being formed. Before the civil war that tore apart the US, great breakthroughs were made in artificial intelligence, courtesy of one Dr. Milton. Milton is a genius--but we also discover he is a ill-tempered misanthrope who is disillusioned with the human race generally and also feels he has been screwed over by the corporation he has been working for. This leads to him creating four war mechas, which he names for the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--Death, War, Famine and Pestilence. These are nigh-unstoppable killing machines, and he sends them out into the world, with the express purpose of bringing the human race down.

Twenty years later, our protagonist is one of those war mechas who threw off its original programming/control and tried to reverse the harm it did before it gained free will. It has been living in isolation for twenty years. As the story opens, it wakes up in a bathtub in a trashed apartment in mostly abandoned New York City with one leg missing. Its quest to find its missing limb, and the friends and purpose it discovers along the way, is what makes up this lovely story of identity, responsibility, and coming to terms with one's past and changing the future.

This is mostly told from the first-person POV of the war mecha, who later names itself Be, and is a very good example of an author's thinking through how an artificial intelligence would think and react to the world. Another important character is the dog Atticus (who does not die by the way, so you don't have to worry about that), who is a cyborg--a combination being with an artificial intelligence implant. Atticus' true identity is revealed later on, and ties in to the discussions about personhood and responsibility:

"You could have told me," I say.

"Tell you what? I am not that mech you knew anymore, even less so than you are the mech you once were. Why can't I just be me and you be you?" he says. "We can choose not to live in our pasts. Isn't that the very thing you and Ver tried to convince me of, back before everything went to hell?"

Be goes through quite the journey with its friends (including some delightful rail mecha, one of which ends up inhabiting an old VW bus). Along the way, it discovers two of its siblings it thought was dead are not deceased at all. One sibling, formerly known as Pestilence (who created one of the artificial nanotech-based pandemics still plaguing humankind), has been captured and imprisoned by Derek Litchfield, who used to be Milton's boss. This Litchfield is a pretty nasty character, who tortured Be's sibling and forced it to use the manufacturing facility run by post-humanity free mechas to manufacture chips that will be used to enslave them and bring them under Litchfield's control. Be's quest to find both its sibling and Litchfield and stay out of the clutches of one General Sawyer, representing the last remaining dregs of the US government, come to a climax in Dr. Milton's ruined underground lab where Be was created.

This book is a little bit on the "cosy" side in that the new society the mechas are creating is based on cooperation and helping one another, and helping the humans they associate with. In fact, one important point that Be makes in talking to Sawyer (who keeps trying to kill it), is that Sawyer, basically, represents the past and the free mechas the future, and she is the one who needs to change:

"Since I left my santuary, I have had occasion to spend a lot of time contemplating the nature of my own existence and purpose," I say. "I have also had time to observe the world, and all the people in it, and how much has changed since the days when you and I were on opposite sides of a war."

"We still are," she [Sawyer] says. "No conversation is going to change that."

"I also," I say, "have observed many things that have not changed, that should have. Please do not take offense, but you are one of them. And if you are going to save your people, you need to evolve, because I cannot stop what is happening to your people and fight you at the same time. On the contrary, I need your help. And you need mine."

(These are not Terminator-style artificial intelligences, for the most part. In fact, Be's other surviving sibling, Ver, has a planetwide network dedicated to rebuilding a more ecologically-friendly civilization and cleaning and rewilding the planet.)

This is an altogether delightful story, with complex characters and thought-provoking themes, and a triumphant, satisfying ending. I loved it. It's one of the best books I've read this year.

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Review: Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I hadn't read any of this series before or even heard of it, but I ended up really enjoying this book. That's one of the best things about voting for the Hugos--you find gems you might have otherwise overlooked.

This is in much the same vein as Marie Brennan's Memoirs of Lady Trent--a Victorian-era woman of science fighting sexism and studying fantastic creatures. In this case, it is fantastic magical creatures: the Fae. Emily Wilde is very much a female scientist of her era, rational and mostly unemotional (twice as much to be considered half as good). She is dedicated to the scientific method, even in the midst of crises, which makes for some pretty funny scenes, sometimes:

"Wendell!" I lunged forward, trying to wrench the roots away from him. They showed no interest whatsoever in me, nor Shadow, who pounced and worried at them until they fell away. But more rose to take their place.

"Why does it want you?" I cried.

"Why do you think, you cold-blooded lunatic of a woman?" he yelled, clawing at the ground. This was followed by a series of curses in what I assumed to be Irish.

I stabbed at the roots with my pocketknife. At the same moment, though, my mind was racing through stories, texts, journals. "Can you not--can you not say it?"

He gave me one of his impossibly green glares. We were nearing the base of the tree, where a hollow like a mouth had yawned open, black and writhing with roots like white worms. "No!"

"Oh," I breathed. My pocketknife was having little effect, but I kept up the stabbing nevertheless--I believe I stabbed him once, accidentally, for I had gone back into my mind. "You can't reveal to me that you're Folk--it must have been part of the enchantment that exiled you from your world. Isn't that it? I've heard of that--yes, that account of the Gallic changeling. And isn't it a peripheral motif within the Ulster Cycle? Bryston's theory was that--"

"Oh, God," he moaned. "She wants to discuss theory at a moment like this. I am doomed, aren't I?"

The "Wendell" mentioned here is Emily's colleague, Wendell Bambleby, a vain, insufferable professor at Cambridge, who we eventually discover is an exiled Faerie king. Wendell follows Emily to her research assignment in the far-off country of Ljosland, and adventures and hijinks ensue. Wendell and Emily have a combative relationship, with much exasperation on Emily's part and plenty of razor-sharp dialogue flying back and forth. Of course, it comes out that Wendell is head over heels in love with Emily--in a typical understated, British stiff-upper-lip way and an even more traumatized king-of-Faerie way--and later on in the story he asks her to marry him. Emily doesn't turn him down, and at the end, at the scientific conference where they are presenting their joint paper about the discoveries they made in Ljosland, she seems to be entertaining the idea.

In between, Emily discovers more about Faerie and makes actual friends in Hrafnsvik, the village where she and Wendell spend the winter. She is a curmudgeon at the beginning of the story and a curmudgeon at the end, but she is beginning to understand the value of reaching out to other people.

I really liked this. It's told in a meticulous, journal-entry style, with footnotes, as befits a serious scientist. I doubt I would have paid attention to this had I not been reading it for the awards, but now that it's on my radar I'm going to pick up all three volumes.

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Review: Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe

Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is another entry in the so-called "cosy" trend, as in "cosy young-adult fantasy romance." The spoiler is right there in the title: the two protagonists, Brenda Nguyen and Katherine "Kat" Woo, live in parallel universes linked by periodic fluctuating portals. Brenda's universe is ours; Kat's is our world, more or less, with an industrial revolution of magic instead of the internal combustion engine. (Which also means, for Kat's world, the existence of dragons, pixies, and other magical creatures, and nearly non-existent climate change, although capitalism is as rapacious in her universe as ours.)

Now, this could have been a very interesting scenario, with some thoughtful examination of the contrasts between the two universes, and an appreciation of the roads not taken in the magical one. Unfortunately, the author doesn't choose that route, instead settling for a meet-cute frothy romance between Brenda and Kat and some pretty thin, superficial worldbuilding. Which is obviously the direction she wanted to take, and more power to her. But in the end, that makes this story happy and bubbling with kambayas, and utterly forgettable. I did finish it, but I spent all of the back half longing for some grit in the gears, and a villain less cartoonish than the portal-crossing Shannon Mayfield. The book didn't necessarily need to be grim, but it did need a little more darkness than the author wanted to give it.

(Also? The silly subplot about reducing a dragon to the size of a cat and, conversely, making Brenda's friend Erica's cat Fancy the size of a minivan nearly threw me out of the story altogether. Because, really? Any house cat suddenly enlarged to be as big as a sabertoothed tiger would not be sweet and cute, but utterly terrifying. Look, I have two cats myself, and I love them, but I know for a fact if my fifteen-pound Mocha grew as large as a fucking Smilodon [maybe 1,000 pounds], I would run from him screaming, not try to ride him.)

That's pretty much the problem with the cosies I've tried to read, I think. They're okay while I'm turning the pages, and the characters usually hold my interest...and they vanish from my mind the instant I close the back cover. I like stories that are thought-provoking, and layered, and take some effort to tease out all the subtleties and facets. Those kinds of books stick with the reader long after they're finished. This one, unfortunately, didn't.

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Review: Radiant Star

Radiant Star by Ann Leckie
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I normally love Ann Leckie's books, but I could not get into this one. Part of that is that this is written in omniscient POV, and I am not a fan of head-hopping. Also, despite being set in the Imperial Radch universe, the worldbuilding felt thin. Finally, I could not figure out what the heck the titular object/MacGuffin the Radiant Star actually was (which probably would have been answered further on, but I didn't get that far). I persevered for nearly a hundred pages, but in the end, I didn't care enough about any of these people to continue.

Which is okay. Not every author's book is for every reader, and I love the original Imperial Radch trilogy enough to make up for this.

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Review: Children of Strife

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the fourth book in the Children of Time series, a far-future saga of humans' expanding into the stars, leaving behind a dead Earth, and terraforming other planets. These particular books (as are most of the author's books) are chunky both in the sense of sheer page counts and the weight of the ideas those pages hold. This particular story boasts three timelines set centuries apart, which nevertheless braid together neatly at the end. It's also a somewhat bleak cautionary tale of what happens when a group of entitled megalomaniac sociopaths are set free to indulge all their selfish baser instincts--at least until the climax, when they run up against a stronger force with no fucks left to give, which ends up restraining them for the good of everyone.

(One almost wishes there was an alien Mira on Earth right now who could stop the techbros, corporations and other conservative baddies currently wreaking havoc on our present timeline. But I digress.)

Despite this being the latest book in the series, this is more or less a stand-alone story. It helps to have read the other books, but it is not necessary. The author provides just enough background on the characters to bring the reader up to speed. What this book does is expand on events only given a passing mention in the previous volumes. (The reader is caught up on all this at the beginning of the story, in a nice precise three-page summary that sets the scene for what is to follow.) There are a few returning characters, in particular the sapient Portiid spiders Portia and Fabian, and the AI Avrana Kern, but the main focus is on the said group of rich sociopaths who end up terraforming an alien Earth-like planet with their own brand of genetically engineered, accelerated-evolution ecosystems. This becomes the planet Marduk of the present-day timeline, with its endlessly mutating monsters and plant life that can exist in vacuum. This planetary ecosystem, which is manipulated into becoming an organic computer capable of holding the uploaded minds of its creators after they die, takes over both the generation ark ship arrived from Earth's past and the present day Dissenter, an exploration ship captained by the best of the new characters (and the best character in the book, as far as that goes): the sapient mantis shrimp Cato.

I must stop to tout Cato in particular, because he really should have been the hero of this entire book. I realize the author was using multiple POVs to tell his story, and with the three separate timelines this was absolutely necessary--but I still wish Cato could have gotten far more page time than he did. His character journey was fascinating. The uplifted Stomatopods, in this universe, are bad-tempered, belligerent, pugnacious crustacean heavyweight fighters who would just as soon punch your head off as look as you, as Cato aptly demonstrates when he meets another of the main characters. But as we discover more of Cato's past and realize the genocide he was a part of, he reaches a turning point where he has a chance to give in to his primal urge to battle--and he backs down. In many ways, this is the most important plot point in the story, what Cato has learned because of what he did:

The feeling of failure and weakness burns through every segment of him. Only one sensation is worse. How he'd felt when the Portiid ships had found him. Sitting alone in his ship after the orgy of glorious battle that had been the Escalation. Coming to a realization of what they'd all done. The communal madness that had taken them, so they'd fought and fought. Seeking the searing inner reward of victory, which the weaponry and the distance attenuated, meaning instead of one defeated enemy they required ten, a hundred, a thousand. Chasing the hit, the dream of warrior greatness until...until...

Seventy-two survivors. Out of how many hundred thousand? And only that many still living because, by then, they were so far-spaced they couldn't find each other. Cato remembers.

He remembers that, when they found him, he would have fought them. Fought them and, in that madness, avoided facing up to what he'd done. Lost himself to the delusion of martial triumph. As with his own language, though, the Portiid communications let their emotional state bleed through. Incredulity, horror. Seeing himself through their many eyes.

His people were the best warriors, the hardest hitters. The stories they told themselves of their prowess, to cover for the fact that all the knowledge, all the tech, all the interstellar travel was the province of other species. So in that moment, he understood the Portiid rescue party saw things he'd blinded himself to. They saw the truth of what the Stomatopods had done with the star system they'd claimed. Turned it into a charnel house, drifting with wrecks and corpses. The old ways and the new technology; a terrible combination. He'd seen himself as they saw him, and realized he was a monster.

(It's too bad some of the other characters in the book couldn't have similar epiphanies--in particular the Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos knockoff, Gerey Hartmand, the ego-driven "Great Man" who sets all the genetically-engineered horrors of Marduk in motion. But don't worry, Hartmand gets what's coming to him, yes he does.)

This book is dense and chewy, both in story and theme. There are characters who attain godhood, and reject it to become human again; polar opposite characters who merge consciousness to find the two of them together are greater than either one alone; a devouring alien fungus who gives her all to hold on to her sense of self and recognition of the worth of other individual people; the guilt-ridden war criminal who manages to find another life; and, at the end, the rich sociopath who cannot, will not, change, only to find himself banished from everything and whose only future is to die alone. I've read plenty of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books, but this is one of his very best. You should not miss it.

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Review: Ignore All Previous Instructions

Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have all the volumes of this author's Outside trilogy, which features an autistic protagonist fighting against extradimensional god-like quantum AI computers. This book has similarities in some respects, including another autistic protagonist. But despite its setting of a future where humanity has spread throughout the solar system and the protagonist Kelli Reynolds makes her home on one of the moons of Jupiter, feels far closer to our world. This is because the antagonists are not sentient computers but predatory corporations which use generative AI to usurp most of the privileges and roles humans have in society. This reaches the point of trademarking every possible iteration of intellectual property and making it illegal for people to create their own entertainment--books, movies, literally any creative endeavor.

The result is a book which, in its way, is more horrifying than any godlike AI, because it feels almost inevitable.

Kelli Reynolds is a "script supervisor" for the streaming series Ship of Fools. She has helped create many of the characters for this popular show, but she does not write the storylines--rather, she edits what the generative AI spits out, and the percentage of input she has on the finished scripts is strictly regulated. Everything must be bland and inoffensive, with no political bias or viewpoints. These types of shows are immensely popular, because Universal Basic Income has been implemented in the Jovian system: a necessity since AI has taken most people's jobs and they have nothing else to do but sit home and watch this so-called "entertainment." The masses also get to vote on the directions the storylines take, the romances the characters have, et cetera.

The story starts with Kelli getting a message from an old girlfriend, a trans man who now goes by the name of Rowan. He wants her help with...something. At the beginning of the story, Kelli is more than a little naive and--I guess "accomodating" is the word, as we gradually discover something happened in her past that makes her reluctant to make waves. She goes with Rowan to another Jovian moon, and from there gets drawn into his life of crime, which involves stealing the "character kernel" of Orlando, the main character of Ship of Fools that Kelli created.

There is a parallel timeline running here, of Kelli and Rowan in the present and Kelly and Rowan's previous identity Amelia in the past. We gradually read the story of both their autistic/queer awakenings, as Kelli realizes she is gay and Rowan realizes he is trans. In this future, LGBTQ people are not quite illegal, but they are definitely discouraged from living their full authentic lives. This culminates in the suicide of Rowan's friend Elaine, and leads to the incident that breaks Kelli and Rowan's burgeoning romance. Elaine had sought therapy from another AI, and this tragically failed her:

It had done the thing the language model always did. It had done its level best to erase the truth of people like Am and Elaine and replace it with the most bland, palatable, averaged-out combination of words that it knew. And when Elaine needed help--with her sexuality and gender, or with whatever had happened with Oscar, or with who knew how many other complicated things--the model had erased the truth so hard that it erased her, too.

The people in charge had made it do that on purpose. They'd made all these laws, saying that you couldn't talk about any of this stuff with minors, for a reason. They'd thought it was worth losing a few Elaines so that they could keep not talking about it. Maybe they really believed this was better; maybe whatever they feared would happen, if they did let people talk about things, was awful beyond description. But the result was the same either way. It wasn't an accident. Someone, somewhere, had bloodlessly done that calculation and decided.

This is the story of Kelli throwing off the shackles of her society, both mind and body; it's also the story of Kelli and Rowan finding their way back to each other. The stakes here are far personal, with nary an alien or a galaxy-wide threat in sight. Yet in a way, this is more scary than a book of that sort, because with all the attacks levied on LGBTQ people in the past few years, this is a future you can easily see coming to pass. And then when you have the terrible corporations, like Kelli's employer Inspiration, adding to people's misery in the name of profit:

All these months she'd worked for Inspiration, so proud of herself, so careful to be good. Rowan had expected her to try to put queer and subversive things into her shows, and she'd never dared. She knew the rules. She knew where her righteous anger could lead if it went unchecked. After the fire, Kelli had tried to be good, by Inspiration's standards. She'd been good for so long, and it didn't matter. Because Inspiration was barely even angry about the fire. What really bothered them was that she was a lesbian, that she cared about other people like her, that she wanted things to change. Even though, the whole time they employed her, she'd never been brave enough to do a single thing about it. The fact that she wanted it was already too much to forgive.

This book lays down a scenario, applicable to its setting but even more to our world, that anything short of the full-throated acceptance and support of LGBTQ people is unacceptable; that not accepting them leads to their death, either of the body or the spirit. That message is never more relevant than now.

Whether or not you like messages in your fiction, this book has the worldbuilding and depth of characterization to pull it off. It's sharper and more in-your-face than the author's previous books, and it's definitely the kind of story we need.

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Review: Hell's Heart

Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is summed up by the tag on the front cover: "Sapphic Moby-Dick In Space."

This is absolutely true, and will probably mean more to you if you've read Herman Melville's classic original. I haven't, but at the same time there's so much commentary on Moby-Dick floating around everywhere that I've managed to absorb a great deal about it, simply by osmosis. It was published in 1851 and written in the style of that era: a slow pace and flowery prose, and frequent side-jaunts into exposition and downright infodumps, especially about whales and whaling. And of course we have the famous opening line: "Call me Ishmael."

Hell's Heart starts with this: "Call me...call me whatever the fuck you like. Isha. Or Isobel. Io. Imogen. Iris. Ivy." This sets the stage for the first-person narrator: snarky, irreverent, extremely fucked-up, susceptible to manipulation, yearning for danger, both of space and hunting the Leviathans--the gigantic aliens in the atmosphere of Jupiter--and a writer very aware of the fact that she's telling what happened to the Pequod decades after the destruction of the ship and the deaths of the crew. She frequently breaks what would be called in television "the fourth wall," speaking directly to her reader in often sarcastic terms. Sometimes you think she's learning from all the things that have happened to her along the way, but at the end of the book when she leaves her lover Q on what remains of a depopulated and strip-mined Earth and returns to space, you realize she really hasn't. Which is aptly summed up in the novel's final line:

And only I am returned. Alone.

This book has Moby-Dick's characters, but the three main ones--Ishmael, Queeqeeg, and Captain Ahab--are gender-flipped, and known as Isha, Q, and A. Aside from that, the bones of the classic tale are there: pursuit and revenge, hatred and obsession, and the captain's all-consuming quest to hunt down and kill what is here called the Mobius Beast. The biggest difference is the setting. Instead of the oceans of Earth, we have the atmosphere of Jupiter, and these Leviathans are huge (sometimes hundreds of feet long) alien creatures evolved in that atmosphere, with Lovecraftian tentacles and hundreds of eyes, and Alien-like jaws within jaws. These Leviathans are hunted for their "sperm," their cerebrospinular fluid that, harvested and refined, powers human civilization. Humans have spread from the ruins of Earth to most of the solar system, but instead of relying on solar or fusion, they rely on a limited natural resource (although realistically, given Jupiter's immense size, there are probably trillions of Leviathans there). Hunting these creatures in the planet's deadly, turbulent atmosphere (the titular Hell's Heart, besides being a quotation from the original book, is, I believe, a reference to Jupiter's Great Red Spot) is every bit as dangerous as it sounds, and as foolish, when there could easily be alternate forms of energy.

(It only occurred to me after I finished the book that we could say the same things about fossil fuels, in our reality.)

This book sticks fairly closely to the plot and pacing of Moby-Dick and employs a lot of the same terminology. It is also--and how do I put this--a lot sexier than the original. Oh, to heck with beating around the bush: most of the characters here fuck, like, a lot. Isha is both involved with Q and is Captain A's fucktoy, with only contributes to her cultish worship of the captain, even as she realizes that A is likely leading them to their deaths. In the end, at the culmination of that three-day chase, the captain's death is almost anticlimactic: A stabs the Beast in one of its eyes and is riding the harpoon line out to confront it, and the Mobius Beast simply opens the first set of its multiple jaws and snatches the captain out of the sky, gulping her down like a crocodile snapping up a pesky insect. After that it rounds on the Pequod and crushes the ship and everything on it, making its stores of raw spermaceti explode, and only Isha and Q escape out of everyone, spinning away from the ruins of the ship in a lifepod.

Of course, the heart of the tale is the hunt, and the obsession, and the crew's being led along by a charismatic narcissist they cannot bring themselves to gainsay. (Sound familiar?) Along the way there are discussions of religion and the awful, predatory capitalism in this bleak, nasty future (there are no countries anymore, just predatory pharmaceutical- and corporate-states that own and profit from every facet of society). People are simply broken here, like Isha. She knows it, and the reader knows it.

I don't know if you could say I liked this book as much as I was drawn in by the author's audacity in retelling the classic novel the way she did. Isha's unique voice was the book's main draw, for me, and took me past what sometimes seemed like glacially slow pacing. This book is what it is, and you have to take it that way, warts and all. I think if you like it, you'll really like it. I'm not going quite that far, but I don't think I regret reading it, either.

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Review: The River Has Roots

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book surprised the heck out of me. I went into it basically cold, knowing nothing about it--and closed the back cover on a beautiful story, wonderfully told.

This is a fantasy that has the feel of a fairy tale centuries old, a maybe-true story that has passed into myth and legend, and still has so much to say. At its heart it's the tale of the love between sisters, and how that love will transcend time and even death. It also casts its magic in the structure of grammar and the language of music, with lush, supple prose. Just look at this paragraph:

Most music is the result of some intimacy with an instrument. One wraps one's mouth around a whistle and pours one's breath into it; one all but lays one's cheek against a violin; and skin to skin is holy drummer's kiss. But a harp is played most like a lover: you learn to lean its body against your breast, find those places of deepest, stiffest tension with your hands and finger them into quivering release. You rock together, forward and back; your left hand keeps a base rhythm while your right weaves a melody through it, and they flutter past each other as the music becomes more complex, swells, breaks, shakes the body of your instrument in joy and grief alike, in the wild, wonderful grammar of being alive.

There are songs in this book, in the mode of Loreena McKennitt's take on the old English ballad "The Bonny Swans"--murder ballads, they're called, and the protagonist uses one to reveal her murderer, the man who drowned her for her land and sent her to Faerie--here known as Arcadia. This is Esther Hawthorn, who loved a Fae--here named Rin, but who seems to be Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness. Esther's sister is Ysabel, the younger of the two, who works with Esther to guard the two willow trees, the Professors, watching over the magical River Liss, the river that flows out of Arcadia. The River Liss brings magical "grammar" to the human world, and human witches "conjugate" it into many useful things.

Esther is being courted by one Samuel Pollard, and turns him down because she has fallen in love with Rin. In a jealous rage, Samuel drowns her in the river, but because of her ties to Rin (a betrothal ring) the River Liss flows backwards and delivers Esther's body into Arcadia. There she is reawakened into life, but because she died on the other side, she can only return to the human world in a different form. She asks Rin to make her into a harp, and when Rin brings her back to her parents' house where Pollard has shifted his attentions to Ysabel, Esther sings a murder ballad of identification and Pollard is exposed. Then she has to go back with Rin into Faerie, but before they leave Rin gives Ysabel a hint on how she can find a hidden entrance and sing her way back in--and years later, Ysabel does just that, bringing herself and her young child into the Fae-lands, and the sisters are reunited at last.

It's a simple enough tale, but it has a lovely timelessness. There is even an "I" narrator who is never identified, and in the end who the narrator might be (Ysabel's child, maybe?) doesn't matter. I was completely caught up in the story of Esther and Ysabel. This book is simply gorgeous, and you owe it to yourself to read it.

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