Review: Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded

Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded by Jason Heller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite the title, this isn't a biography of David Bowie, though he does figure prominently in it. (It is rather bittersweet reading at times, as the author makes plain how keenly Bowie is still missed.) It is, however, the chronicle of a decade, the 70's, bookended by Bowie's Major Tom songs, 1969's "Space Oddity" and 1980's "Ashes To Ashes." The focus here is on the marriage of rock, funk, disco, New Wave, and punk music with science fiction and fantasy. David Bowie is one of this eclectic blend's foremost practitioners, but he is by no means the only one, as the author's exhaustive research demonstrates.

Indeed, the progression of forgotten artists and songs across these pages is amazing. (And amusing, such as the anecdotes of Jefferson Starship, apparently post-Grace Slick, acting as the holo band in the much-maligned Star Wars Holiday Special, and a pre-Doctor Who Peter Capaldi singing and playing on an SF song with his group, the Dreamboys.) The prog-rock band Hawkwind, with its SF connection being the novelist Michael Moorcock, is almost as prominent as Bowie and Paul Kantner, who, with Jefferson Airplane, released the first Hugo-nominated album, Blows Against the Empire, in 1970. There's also a very interesting discussion of the amount of music inspired by Star Wars in 1977, including the disco-fied Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk (which I remember owning once upon a time! It might've been worth something now, dammit!).

This book's twelve chapters cover the marriage of SF and music from the end of the 60's to the beginning of the 80's, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to the birth of MTV. What a long, strange trip it was, and I'm grateful to the author for chronicling it.

View all my reviews

First Impressions: Star Trek: Discovery S2 Ep 2, "New Eden"

Well. This was a rather nice balance. It seems (or at least I hope so) that that season of Discovery is becoming more of an ensemble story, instead of The Trials and Tribble-ations Tribulations of Michael Burnham. This was more or less a bottle show, even though it did advance the overall season arc (and Young Spock is still nowhere to be seen). The primary mystery is the seven signals (spread over 30,000 light-years, as Captain Pike helpfully reminded us), and the fiery-winged "angels" seen by Burnham in the season opener, and also apparently Spock in his nightmares. These "angels" also play an important role in the self-contained plot of this episode, rescuing a group of humans from World War III and transporting them to an Earth-like planet thousands of light-years away.

(Hmmmm....what makes me think these "angels" are going to turn out to be not-so-angelic after all?)

Sylvia Tilly remains an eccentric, flighty, resourceful delight, and she and Saru seem to be developing a nice relationship. They had a very good scene together. Stamets is still grieving for Hugh, Michael has admitted learning to follow orders the hard way, and Christopher Pike is developing some interesting layers. For me, the most positive development is the bridge crew being given more to do and starting to flesh out their personalities. Please, more of this.

If the show continues on in this same general vein, I will say the behind-the-scenes upheavals and the change in showrunners is definitely for the better. I liked a great deal of the first season (especially Jason Isaacs), but this is tentatively starting to feel like Star Trek.

Review: Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is similar to another book I read last year, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, by Soraya Chemaly. (Review here.) I also gave that one five stars. I think this book has the edge, because Rebecca Traister is the better writer. But the subject and the treatment thereof is similar: the explosion of women's rage after the election of the pussy-grabber in the Oval Office.

(And this book definitely has the better cover. On its face, it's plain red and white, but hold it at a certain angle and you see the entire front cover is plastered with transparent F*CKs, over and over.)

In this book, Traister lays out the basis for womens' anger serving as the basis for revolutionary societal change, from Abigail Adams through Shirley Chisholm and Andrea Dworkin and Black Lives Matter till now. She discusses the concept of intersectionality, the ways various oppressions meet and intersect with each other, at great length, and calls out white women in the history of feminism for not supporting their sisters of color, which she describes as the backbone of most revolutionary movements. She also discusses the season of #metoo, the hashtag of sexual harassment and the volcanic explosion of rage in 2017 as women told their stories, bringing down many powerful men. The final section, "The Exhilaration of Activism," tells how women have taken their anger and transformed it into action, from civil disobedience to radical art to thousands of women signing up to run for office, many of whom had never considered doing so before. (This book ends before the 2018 midterms, when many of those same women flipped dozens of legislative seats nationwide, including 40 seats in the House of Representatives.)

It's a fascinating, well-researched book, and it, together with Soraya Chemaly's, do a wonderful job of tapping into the current cultural zeitgeist. These two authors are the perfect chroniclers of what's happening, and I hope they continue.

View all my reviews

Review: Markswoman

Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There were some good things about this book (mainly the worldbuilding) and I liked several aspects of it, but in the end it didn't really grab me. This is the author's first book, and I think she has promise, but I'm not sure I'll pick up the next book(s) in the series. Maybe at the library, but I don't think I'll be buying it.

The worldbuilding, however, was very interesting, and the backstory of this world worked into the overall plot quite well. Perhaps this is Earth, perhaps not; we're eight hundred and fifty years past an apocalyptic event known as the Great War, which may or may not be a nuclear holocaust; and there are mysterious beings called "the Ones," who may or may not be aliens. (I suspect the former, due to the fact that they left behind a sentient, telepathic metal called kalishium which can be worked into knives--and guns--and bond with humans, and they were the apparent builders of the Transport Hubs. This is a bit of a MacGuffin that is accessible by the katari, or the magical daggers, and can magically move people great distances...and ahead in time as well, it seems.) If all of this sounds way too vague, well, it kind of is. But it provides a fascinating subtext to the story, and presumably some of these mysteries will be revealed in subsequent books.

Where this book fell down for me is the uneven pacing and the characterizations. After a slam-bang first chapter, we meander almost halfway through the book before what I thought of as the real story began, and from there it's a breathless race to the cliffhanger ending. Some characters--Shirin Mam and Nineth, in particular--are much better written than others. Unfortunately, the "others" includes the protagonist, Kyra. I just couldn't connect very well with her. And the villain, Tamsyn, seemed cartoonishly over the top, despite a valiant attempt to humanize her in the last chapters. Also re the pacing, I couldn't believe the climactic final fight, the thing Kyra spent half the book training for and obsessing over, took place over the sum total of four pages. That definitely felt like a cheat. And the ending was so rushed I could hardly figure out what was going on.

So this was okay, but I'm not jumping up and down and squeeing over it. Hopefully the author can get some of these issues corrected in the next book.

View all my reviews

First Impressions: Star Trek: Discovery, Season 2 Ep 1, "Brother"

(I'll try to keep this as vague as possible, to avoid too many spoilers.)

• This show is as gorgeous as ever. The special effects are feature-film worthy, even in the madcap (and probably nausea-inducing, for some people) section to land on the asteroid. 
• We're obviously setting up for a season-long arc here. There's the Enterprise! (Although it's conveniently damaged and knocked off-line in the first fifteen minutes.) And Captain Christopher Pike! (No Number One yet. [Edit: Yes, there is a Number One, per i09. Sorry, I missed that.]) And Spock, going AWOL! And flashbacks to Michael Burnham's childhood, with a petulant-looking child Spock. And Sarek, a little more palatable and a little less shitty this time around, so far at least. And a galaxy-spanning mystery, apparently tied in to Spock's nightmares.
• We get names for the bridge crew! Hurrah! They appear to be gelling, and the obnoxious (white) guy gets hoist on his own petard and wiped out by a rock. Nobody seems to miss him very much.
• Sylvia Tilly remains utterly delightful, and Saru has a laugh-out-loud scene when his threat ganglia extrude.
• There's a rather abrupt jump-cut at the end, when Burnham goes aboard the Enterprise, into Spock's quarters, and taps into his personal log. (And how could she do that, for that matter? Wouldn't officers have security encryption on their logs?) I suppose they had to do this for the final reveal about Spock, but I thought it was rushed and clumsy. Although they don't seem to want to show very much of the Enterprise, probably to avoid as much wrath from TOS fans as possible.
• There were several good character interactions in this episode, particularly between Tilly and Stamets. (Does anyone think he's really going to leave the Discovery? Come on.)
• With Captain Pike now at the helm, (even if he does say it's more of a "joint custody" situation between him and Saru), the show is trying to distance itself from last season's Lorca nastiness (even though I thought Jason Isaacs was one of the best things about the first season), and back to more classical Starfleet ideals. And, as Pike said, "have a little fun" along the way. 

This first episode is definitely lighter in tone, even with their Priority One threat. Hopefully they can maintain a good balance. We'll see. I'll give this one a B to start off with, and we'll go on from there. See you next Thursday!

Review: Like Never and Always

Like Never and Always by Ann Aguirre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ann Aguirre is one of my favorite authors. I have her Sirantha Jax series (space opera), her Razorland series (post-apocalyptic young adult), and her Corine Solomon series (urban fantasy). This is a standalone, I think, and it's one of the best books she's ever written.

It's also hard to describe without spoilers, because the central MacGuffin, the event that tips it from a contemporary YA into a fantasy one, is in and of itself a massive spoiler. (Yes, I know other reviews, and even the book's own jacket copy, have let this slip. I'm not going to join in.) Some people might balk at referring to this as a fantasy, because other than the MacGuffin, it is set firmly in our day. I suppose one could call it "magical realism," of the I Will Believe One Impossible Thing Before Breakfast sort. The One Thing is granted at the beginning of the story, the story goes on from there, and no actual explanation is provided, although a couple of theories are floated. In the end, the One Thing, in a sense, doesn't really matter, because the story isn't about that. It's about friendship; and one best friend living and the other friend dying; and survivors' guilt; and whether we really know the ones we love; and the secrets we hide, even from the people closest to us.

It's also a beautiful, emotional story, with stellar characterization (and a rather adult take on sex, for an ostensibly young-adult novel). There are a couple of thriller-ish plot twists, but the story's focus isn't on that. The focus is on the journey these characters take after the MacGuffin has turned their lives inside out. This is a wonderful book, and dammit, it should be up for awards.

View all my reviews

Review: A Blade So Black

A Blade So Black by L.L. McKinney
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is an updated version of Alice in Wonderland, with a rather interesting worldbuilding conceit and an African-American protagonist. I'm glad it exists, because young black women need representation too, and let's face it, Lewis Carroll's original version was pretty squicky in places. But this book didn't knock my socks off, and there are a couple of reasons why.

First, the good. This version of Wonderland is based on a fascinating premise--it is humanity's collective unconscious, its dreams and nightmares, made flesh. The inhabitants literally depend on humans for their continued existence. Some of those inhabitants are spawned by and feed upon humanity's fears, and these Nightmares can, after a certain point, cross the barrier between Wonderland and our world. When that happens, only certain humans, called Dreamwalkers, can kill them permanently. Dreamwalkers like Alice.

Now, the not so good. Obviously this world owes a lot to Carroll's original, but it owes even more to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Alice is called a "black Buffy" by her best friend, Courtney, which is a rather startling bit of meta commentary.) In so doing, it reveals what I think has become a tiresome trope of teenage slayer-dom: the running conflict with a parent or guardian who doesn't know what the Slayer/Dreamwalker/whatever is doing. Alice's mother obviously loves her daughter, but the only glimpses we get of her are her fighting with Alice/grounding Alice/trying to rein Alice in, which gets repetitive and shallow after a while. Look, parents aren't dumb, and even Buffy's mother had to learn the truth eventually. (Not to mention the fact that between school, work and patrolling, Buffy and her descendants are awake pretty much 24/7, and their superpowers should be living without sleep rather than kickass superstrength.) In this case, with Alice being African-American, I think an opportunity was wasted. I would rather Alice's mother be let in on her secret, and the prime conflict, in addition to the Nightmares, instead be the unfortunate and sick reality of this nation: that of Walking, Working and Living While Black. I think this would have made for a better book.

Secondly, Alice herself is not a strong character, particularly in the first half of the story. Frankly, she whines, cries and reacts rather than acts, and it's only in the latter half of the book, when she steps up and begins taking charge, that she starts to get interesting. One could argue that this character arc is precisely what's supposed to happen, and maybe so, but it is not very well written. Throughout much of the book, Courtney, Addison Hatta and others are better written than the supposed protagonist, which is a problem. Alice's characterization does improve as the book goes along, but I would rather have an entire book with a well-realized main character, instead of half a book.

So this is just a so-so recommendation. As I said, I'm very glad this book has been published. I just wish it was better than it is.



View all my reviews

Meet the New Year/Boss, Same as the Old

It's going to be a tough year.

Full of lies, broken promises, and people getting shafted.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel, hopefully.

And I really hope Mitch McConnell gets his royal comeuppance at the hands of Nancy Smash.

It's going to be a long two years (please Deity, only two), but we can do it. Let's buckle down and get to work.

Review: Embers of War

Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'd never heard of this author before, but when I saw a review mentioning "space opera with multiple first-person viewpoints," I decided that sounded right up my alley. I thought enough of this book to pre-order the sequel after I finished, so thank you, whoever steered me in this direction.

This is a treatise not so much on the horrors of war, which we've seen to the point of becoming a cliche, as to the fragility of peace and the never-ending struggle to hold it together. It also explores the burden of guilt, the difficulty of making atonement for one's actions, and if such atonement is ever really attainable. It does this through two characters: the artificially intelligent ex-warship Trouble Dog, who resigned her commission after participating in a massacre (this particular iteration of AI involves "brains in a jar" cloned from the stem cells of dead soldiers, so they think of themselves as male or female), and her captain, Sally Konstanz. Trouble Dog has already made those terrible decisions--by blindly choosing to follow orders--and Sal Konstanz makes them over the course of this book, albeit rather more deliberately.

There's a lot more involved, of course, including a widely settled galaxy with ancient aliens (shades of Andre Norton's Forerunners, one of my favorite SF tropes), planets carved into art objects, and technology beyond anything humans have, which has been asleep for millennia and is now starting to wake up. It's quite a stew, but a thoroughly enjoyable one. And Trouble Dog will both win your heart and kick your butt. Here's to the next book.

View all my reviews

Review: Search Image

Search Image by Julie E. Czerneda
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the first Web Shifter book in fifteen years, and as such it has to bring the reader up to speed. The slow, languid pace of the beginning chapters is the main reason I didn't rate it higher. Once the story gets going, it's engaging, but it takes a loooonnnnnnngggg time to get there.

If you're a Czerneda fan, that doesn't matter. Esen-alit-Quar is one of the author's most beloved characters, and for good reason. She's one of the most alien protagonists I've ever read, but her personality flows off the page: loyal, naive, curious, stubborn, determined, whimsical, and bubbling with alien humor. In many ways this is a book written for Esen fans and not necessarily an attempt to expand the readership. Which is fine, but just be aware that if you haven't read the three preceding books, this story won't mean nearly as much. (Also, don't skip over the Main Character/Ephemeral Species appendices at the back! They're delightful.)

Having said that, the final chapters serve both as a fine ending to this book's storyline and setting up further books in the series. From the hints we're getting, I suspect the next book will be a lot darker. There's a mystery to solve, and more to learn about this universe and characters. Bring it on, please.

View all my reviews

Review: Kingdom of Needle and Bone

Kingdom of Needle and Bone by Mira Grant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I suspect this will prove to be a marmite of a book: people will love it or hate it. I definitely don't hate it, but I'm not quite sure I love it either.

This is not the fault of the author. This book is typical Mira Grant--well researched, thought out, and written. The POV here is omniscient, an unusual choice for this kind of book (previous Grant books have been first- or tight third-person narratives), but the reason why becomes apparent at the end. What's also apparent from the get-go is the author's dislike (to put it mildly) of the anti-vaxx crowd, and the reader soon realizes this is a thought experiment of what could happen if they get their way.

To go along with this, there are a lot of medical ethics conundrums in this book. In particular, the bodily autonomy argument as used by anti-vaxxers (co-opted from the anti-choice movement) is one I've never thought of before. (Is this argument a thing in the real world?) This becomes the central theme of the book, and is what leads our protagonist--more of an anti-hero, in this case--to do what she does. This is made clear in the creepy, abrupt ending, which reverses everything the reader has previously comprehended about Dr. Isabelle Gauley and her story. The ending is not pleasant, but it has stuck in my mind for days.

I think this story is crying out for a full novel. I hope the response to this novella is such that Mira Grant decides to write it.

View all my reviews