Review: The Stars Are Legion

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my first really good book of 2017. I pre-ordered it sight unseen, and it's quintessential Kameron Hurley: messy, gory and brutal, full of unlikable characters and hard choices.

The worldbuilding stands out with this one, however. The Legion is a swarm of living biological worldships orbiting an artificial sun, and the "humans" (and I use the term loosely, as they're clearly not Earth humans; furthermore, they've evolved in tandem with the worldships) in this book inhabit these worlds like intestinal bacteria, or maybe parasites. Our two protagonists, Zan and Jayd, are both unreliable narrators. Zan because she has amnesia, a groan-inducing trope that turns out to have very important plot reasons, and Jayd because she holds her cards so close to the vest, and is playing such a deeply layered game, the reader is never sure if Jayd herself knows what she is supposed to be doing. Zan and Jayd are part of an ongoing battle for control of the Legion, a generations-long war that is about to come to an end, one way or another. The worlds of the Legion are dying, and the fabled ship the Mokshi, which Zan has been told she repeatedly tries to board, repeatedly fails, and returns with her memories stripped from her each time, holds the key to the Legion's survival.

The book is divided into three sections. The middle section is the longest, and is the torturous story of Zan's journey through the guts of the worldship Katazyrna. This is where the worldbuilding gets down to the blood and guts and slime; there are some deeply disturbing things to be found here, and this part of the book is not for the fainthearted. Yet all this, no matter how nasty it is, is necessary. The people Zan meets on her journey to the upper levels of Katazyrna, and the choices she makes to get her little band to their destination, change Zan in profound ways. This character arc comes to its fruition in the final section of the book, when the truth of Zan's previous life, and her journey, is revealed. The final choice she makes tears herself free of the endless loop she had been trapped in, and sets her newly rebirthed worldship on the path free of the Legion.

This is supposedly a standalone book, but I hope Hurley writes more stories in this universe. I would love to know, at a minimum, how the Legion was built and who built it. Still, we do have this book, and it is fan-freaking-tastic.

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Review: The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man

The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man by Tom King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the best graphic novels I have read this year. I'm not going to write a separate review of the second volume, Little Better Than a Beast, as the two tell one complete story and should be taken together.

This is the story of the Vision, the "synthezoid" (Marvel's version of an android) created by the villain Ultron, and his attempts to live a normal human life with a family. Needless to say, this does not work out. I'm tempted to compare his journey to the story of Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but this is a far darker tale, with extensive quotations (and volume titles) from The Merchant of Venice to drive home the point that this is, and will be, a Shakespearean tragedy. I realized this about halfway through Vol. 1, but that didn't stop me from reading. This may be a tragedy, but it is a fantastic one, with explorations of what it means to be human, whether an artificial being can ever reach such heights, and whether, in the end, any of it matters.

The structure is a little different in that there is an omniscient narrator, the identity of which is revealed at the end of the first volume. The Avengers don't come off too well in this story, (well, we know Tony Stark is an asshole, but here he's rather more assholish than usual), and were I the Vision, I would tell them to leave me the fuck alone from here on out. Which is the beauty of this story, in Volume 1 and (especially) Volume 2: even though the Vision ends up doing some terrible things, the reader understands perfectly why he does them; and this reader, at least, considered whether or not she might do the exact same thing in the given circumstances.

The art, by Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Jordan Bellaire, is very good, perfectly complementing the story. On the last page of Volume 2, there is a bit of (gasp) shall we say hope? for the future, a small glow of light in contrast to this story's darkness. This is a thoroughly adult graphic novel, and should not be missed.

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Review: Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Vol. 1: BFF

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Vol. 1: BFF by Amy Reeder
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was...okay. I prefer graphic novels with more mature storylines, which you can have even when your protagonist is a 9-year-old girl, as in this case. The last third of the story, when our hero Lunella Lafayette takes off on her own to hunt down the bad guys, is the strongest. Lunella is a nicely rounded character, with believable motivations and fears, and I think if she was just a little bit older this would be a better comic. As it is, she's cute without being twee or cutesy, which is good, but this simply doesn't have the depth it needs to be memorable.

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Review: The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really wavered about how many stars to give this. I liked it, but it has its issues, and there is a great deal of handwavium inherent in the premise. This is also one of the grimmest books I have ever read, on a par with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (if nowhere near that book's quality).

Needless to say, All The Triggers applies. Rape, child rape, abuse, violence and extreme misogyny are found here.

This is a near-extinction-of-humanity and death-of-civilization tale, with a virus so virulent it kills 98% of men and more than 99% of women, including all pregnant women. Which is the first of my objections to the worldbuilding--the world's most lethal viruses, such as Ebola, simply do not work that way. Ebola kills something like 90% of its victims, but this occurs over a time frame of weeks and months. The virus here seems to strike the entire world population simultaneously, which is ridiculous. (Unless it was a genetically engineered organism, tailored specifically to humans, introduced years beforehand, and programmed to turn lethal in response to a specific trigger. Something like David R. Palmer's Emergence, which handles this scenario a helluva lot better.) Also, the Unnamed Midwife who is the book's protagonist--she never gives her true name, but goes by various aliases, mostly male, throughout the book--wakes up after who knows how long in a comalike state (somehow without starving to death or dying of thirst, which also bugged me) to find everyone else gone and San Francisco deserted. (And where, pray tell, are all the rotting bodies and feral dogs?)

But put all that aside, if you can, because that was just the pseudo-science to jumpstart the plot. The author's concerns are what happens to humanity after it all but dies out, and what she and the Unnamed Midwife sees isn't pretty. Specifically, men revert to brutish animals and make all remaining women their slaves.

I said "extreme misogyny" in reference to triggers, but it seems to me there is a lot of hatred of men in this story's subtext, thinking that nearly all men would act like this. Or, hell, hatred of humanity in general, that we would automatically revert to knuckle-dragging barbarians in such an event. To be sure, some of us would. But I'm sure that many more men AND women would band together in the hard work of changing to a non-technological, agrarian society (which is what would have to happen) while preserving as much old world technology as is feasible. (For instance, rounding up herd animals, building greenhouses, scavenging as many medical supplies/canned goods as possible, and also constructing windmills/gathering solar panels for power/etc etc etc. Jeezus. I just threw that out in fifteen seconds, and already I've got a much more hopeful scenario than this book.)

I think the reason the author goes with such a grimdark storyline is that the society she envisions coming after, which is established in the prologue and epilogue as a framing device, is so different from our own. For instance, instead of a two-person marriage as the basic unit of society, there are polyamorous "hives" (specifically, one women with two or more men), and women are separating into two different castes, Mothers and Midwives. (Hopefully this is expanded upon more in the sequel, The Book of Etta.)

In the meantime, this storyline is somewhat equivalent to a drive-by car wreck--it's horrific, but you can't take your eyes off it. Meg Elison is a good writer, with sharp pacing, nice characterization, and a good ear for dialogue. I just wish she'd given more thought to her worldbuilding, because that leaves a lot to be desired.

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And Now, A Political Interlude

Today my local paper featured this story on the front page.



Analysis: 380,000 Arizonans May Lose Medicaid

Some highlights:

The analysis by the state’s Medicaid plan obtained by The Associated Press Friday shows keeping most of those people insured would cost the state nearly $500 million a year by 2023.

In a Republican-led state where tax increases are nearly impossible to enact, that’s extremely unlikely.

The report looks at the patients who gained coverage under a Medicaid expansion pushed through in 2013 by former Gov. Jan Brewer over opposition from many in her own party. It now covers about 400,000 Arizonans out of the 1.9 million covered by Medicaid in the state.

Of those 400,000, about 316,000 are childless adults who earn less than the federal poverty limit, and 81,000 earn between 100 percent and 138 percent of the limit.

The analysis released Friday by Arizona’s Medicaid plan looks at several scenarios, none of them pretty for the poor Arizonans currently on Medicaid.

Freezing the current enrollment for the two populations covered by expansion is one option. Another is to only freeze those in the plan who earn above the poverty level.

But the current GOP plan would cut matching funds to states, increasing costs.

Since we have a Republican governor springing from the mold of Kansas' Sam Brownback (i.e., cut taxes every year, no matter what that does to the state coffers, or how public education, to name just one example, suffers as a result), he would never support raising taxes to cover the shortfall, nor would the majority Republican Legislature pass any such thing. So all these people would be shit out of luck. And since, as the story notes, most of these people earn less than the federal poverty level, good luck on them being able to buy insurance on their own.

To put it bluntly, that is obscene.

What do you expect these people to do when they get sick? They're just going to clog the emergency rooms like they did before, and hospitals will lose money from their uncompensated care (which just means you and I, the everyday taxpayer, will pick up the slack). Or, y'know, they'll do what the Republicans seem to want them to do, which is die and get out of the way.

People will die. Make no mistake about it, people will die.

And in the meantime, this asshole Paul Ryan will chortle over finally getting to reduce an "entitlement."

I've said for some time that the driving theme of the Republican party is a simple five words: "I've got mine; fuck you." They don't believe in civilization, other than as a form of feudalism for the 0.01%. They certainly don't believe in the words of Jesus, with his famous refrain: "As you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me."

And now they've voted a narcissistic, tinyhanded monster into the highest office in the land, who will push this clusterfuck that will kill people (hey, remember the retired coal miners, many of whom are afflicted with black lung disease? Say bye-bye to your health care too! And all you malingering old farts who live alone and can't work or drive and get a free Meal on Wheel every day? Screw you, suckers!!) on the country.

But Her Emails.

Review: Revenger

Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've heard this book called "young adult," and the first thing I'd like to say is that it most definitely is not. Yes, the protagonists, sisters Adrana and Arafura Ness, are eighteen and seventeen respectively. That does not matter. This book is too dark, and its first-person narrator far too ruthless, to qualify for the young-adult designation, at least as far as I'm concerned.

What this is is a far-future space opera, of pirates and creepy aliens and ancient skulls, of a solar system (possibly ours) where the planets seem to be smashed into rubble, and the human race has built tens of thousands of habitats out of that rubble. Built them over and over again, as a matter of fact, because we're on the Thirteenth Occupation (now known as the "Congregation"), and the history of the Occupations stretches millions of years into the past. The past is the driving engine of the story, as ships search "baubles" for tech and/or artifacts no one can now understand or duplicate, and one never knows if that tech will make you rich or drive you insane. This idea has obvious parallels with Andre Norton's "Forerunners," which are some of my favorite books of all time.

This is some marvelous worldbuilding (and very artfully done, with nary an infodump to be found), and I hope the author writes more books in this universe, whether or not he continues the story of the Ness sisters. But this book is the tale of Adrana and Arafura Ness, who sign on to a "sunjammer" (a ship riding the solar wind on giant sails that visits the baubles as they open, to scavenge the loot sealed inside) in an attempt to help their father, who just lost all the family's money. They are qualified to be "bone readers," linking to the giant alien skulls on the sunjammers that serve as long-range communications devices. (These are also creepy as heck, with the implications that for all there is no brain tissue left inside, they aren't...really....dead.) However, on their very first voyage they run into the pirate Bosa Sennen, who kills nearly the entire crew and takes Adrana hostage on her ship.

This starts the story, and a dark and bloody one it is. Arafura changes from a naive young girl to an obsessed and ruthless woman, and if in the end she finds her sister and kills Bosa Sennen, her triumph comes at a very high price. To hunt a monster, she basically becomes one. The last few pages of the story shows she realizes this, and if there is a sequel, I hope the consequences of what she's done are dealt with. (I also hope the second book is told from Adrana's viewpoint.) There is so much more that could be done with this universe and characters, and so many questions that deserve answers.

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Review: Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It by Kate Harding
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yes, I sometimes read something other than SFF. I'm very glad I read this. I'm sad and angry, however, that it still needed to be written at all, that the idiotic rape myths summed up by this book's title still have such a hold on our culture.

Never fear though, as Kate Harding blows said myths out of the water. Just as an example (from p. 24):

Myth: She asked for it.
Fact: It is literally impossible to ask for rape. Rape, by definition, is sex you did not ask for. So either you mean that a woman who dresses a certain way, or flirts, or otherwise expresses her sexuality on her own terms somehow deserves to be raped--which would make you a monster--or you are wrong, and she was not asking for it.

Myth: He didn't mean to.
Fact: Rapists like to rape. Most of them do it more than once. In "Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence," David Lisak cites a study in which 120 college men admitted to a total of 483 acts that met the legal definition of rape. Forty-four of those were one-off crimes. The other 439 rapes were committed by 76 serial rapists, who "had also committed more than 1,000 other crimes of violence, from non-penetrating acts of sexual assault, to physical and sexual abuse of children, to battery of domestic partners." Rape is not an accident.

For those who might sputter, "Butbutbut women lie," Harding also takes an entire chapter to discuss the problem of false accusations, dissecting the cases of Crystal Mangum, Tawana Brawley, and the Central Park Jogger. As she points out, however, according to the best available evidence, between 2 and 8 percent of rape accusations are false. My thought upon reading that was, even if we stretch skepticism to the breaking point and round that figure up to 10 percent, that still means ninety percent of reports are true. So, you know, if a woman says she was raped, the odds are she should be believed until, and unless, the evidence proves her wrong.

(This has nothing to do with the legal standard of "innocent until proven guilty," by the way. One can acknowledge a rape most likely occurred while simultaneously recognizing the challenge and necessity of gathering evidence, and prosecuting a case against, a specific person.)

This is in some ways a depressing, but I think an important book. I'd like to see it used in classrooms, especially when it comes to teaching teenagers about rape myths, rape culture, and consent.



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Review: Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Book 1

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Book 1 by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the best writers working today. His non-fiction articles for The Atlantic are usually excellent, and in many cases (particularly "The Case for Reparations" and "My President Was Black") they are, or should be, required reading for anyone interested in the complex nature of race relations in the United States.

But as good a writer as Coates is, writing a comic book series is a whole different ballgame.

That isn't to say this first volume of Black Panther is a failure. Or, if it is, it is a very interesting and ambitious failure. I would describe it as more of an extended, and necessary, learning curve. Coates clearly has some great things planned for his characters and the country of Wakanda (which is a character in its own right), and I am willing to stick around and see what happens.

This volume is bursting with potential. The main character of T'Challa is introduced, a king who has lost his way, along with what seem to be his three main antagonists--Zenzi, the Deceiver who is fomenting revolution, and Aneka and Ayo, the renegade Dora Milaje (T'Challa's elite female warrior bodyguards). All three villains have logical motivations; they are, as good villains must be, heroes of their own story.

Unfortunately there is precious little in the way of a plot to be found here--it seems more or less one giant setup, and a rather meandering, disjointed one at that. I enjoyed the introduction of the characters, the exploration of the country itself (there's a map provided, and we visit several different locations), the various villain backstories, and some small side tales of Wakandan myths and legends. The art is bright and colorful for the most part, well suited to the various vignettes--which is all they are. They're not a cohesive story, which is this volume's greatest weakness.

Having said all that, the groundwork has been laid. If Coates can come up with a good story to match his appealing world, he'll have a winner on his hands.

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