Review: Compound Fracture

Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Andrew Joseph White has made something of a name for himself these past few years (at least as far as this reader is concerned) writing stories about trans teenagers. This book strikes a whole lot closer to home than his previous two, as it is set in West Virginia in 2017, and name-checks Donald Trump and US politics. In fact, this book is far more political than the author's first two ( Hell Followed With Us and The Spirit Bares Its Teeth ) combined, so if you object to in-your-face progressive politics (the protagonist calls himself a socialist) you should think about skipping this. If you are a conservative, and especially a MAGA conservative, you will likely be enraged by many of the things contained therein.

Having said all this, I didn't like this as much as the first two, and not because of the politics. The author seems to have a fairly accurate depiction of the people of West Virginia, their poverty, hopelessness and pride, why they distrust coastal "elites" and many of them refuse to leave, even those who, like our trans protagonist Miles, face fear and oppression just for existing. I enjoyed the part of the storyline that refers to a century-old coal-miner's strike, led by Miles' great-great-grandfather Saint Abernathy (who also turns out to be trans) and how that conflict has echoed down to the present day, affecting everyone in Twist Creek County. Miles' family, the Abernathys, are feared and distrusted by nearly everyone, and are persecuted by Sheriff Davies and his ilk. The sheriff is the primary antagonist, a strutting little tyrant who manipulates and rules over everyone in Miles' small town, to the point of trying to murder Miles' father for simply attempting to run for office.

No, what put me off this book a bit is the fact that Miles and his best friend/possible boyfriend Cooper exhibit some...sociopathic murderous tendencies? Although I do understand it to a point: at the story's beginning, Miles is nearly beaten to death by the sheriff's son Noah and a couple of his buddies, and Miles knows there will be no justice; in fact, Sheriff Davies threatens him into saying he did not see who attacked him. So I can understand why he would feel that his back is against the wall, and the only way out is to kill his tormentors. At the same time, he also starts seeing the ghost of Saint Abernathy and realizes that he is autistic. This last character beat in particular rings true, especially Miles' habit of chewing on a shoelace to calm himself down and keep from chewing on his hair.

Nevertheless, Cooper and Miles are participants in three murders (the first was an accident, but they hid the body afterwards by throwing it down a mine shaft) and Miles doesn't really feel remorse for any of it? At the same time, this is a very complicated and nuanced situation, and I imagine many people will disagree with my assessment of it. I'm sure the school of thought that Miles and the people of Twist Creek had no other choice than to rise up against their tormenters will carry the day for many readers.

(Content warning: There is a dog on the cover, Miles' dog Lady. Not only does the dog not die, but she saves Miles and saves the day at the climax, albeit in a rather grisly fashion.)

In the end, I think this is a timely, thought-provoking book, even if I wish I liked it more than I did. Nevertheless, I think it will enhance the author's already burgeoning reputation.

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Review: Unexploded Remnants

Unexploded Remnants by Elaine Gallagher
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This 109-page novella is stuffed full of enough ideas for a full-length novel. The author has published non-fiction reviews and articles and even wrote and produced a short film, but this is apparently their first professional fiction publication. As such, I can certainly understand the impulse to throw out nearly every idea they've ever had, as they are probably worried about whether the book will sell enough for them to be able to publish again.

I understand it, but as a reader I felt a bit cheated. There is so much going on here, and because of the novella length restraints, we have no time to sit and absorb what we're being told. The characters also have neither space or time to react to what is happening to them--they must run at breakneck speed to the next plot point. The worldbuilding particularly suffers in this: there are many questions that could be asked about the wormhole gate network that provides travel throughout the galaxy. Particularly the basic questions of who, how and why? As well as when, considering there is a secret wormhole gate hidden in a Stonehenge-like structure (which has somewhat unpleasant callbacks to that hoary old bestseller of the 70's, Chariots of the Gods?)? These wormhole gates take our protagonist Alice on a rapid-fire planet-hopping journey that shows us many different living and dead civilizations, laying down what could have been a fascinating tapestry of a galaxy that has had countless sapient beings and many star-spanning civilizations rise and fall over the years. Many interesting worlds are whisked by in rapid succession as Alice jumps from planet to planet to evade her pursuers, and several times I wished for a plot-relevant reason to slow the pace of travel down, so we the reader could have a chance to really see some of the alien weirdness Alice is passing through.

Not the least of this book's many revelations is the fact that Alice is the last surviving human: her story begins in Oxford in 1967, when Alice, a trans person then going by the name of Andrew, falls down the rabbit hole of the ancient wormhole network and is transported to the Archive, the galaxy's central repository for archaeogical and cultural artifacts. She is made an Archive agent and sent back to Earth to attempt to save humanity from their self-destructive streak. but humans succeeded in destroying themselves anyway. Alice was evacuated before the final war and has spent the hundreds of years since (this world's clone and transplant technology means she is functionally immortal) traveling the galaxy and bringing her finds to the Archive.

The "unexploded remnant" of this story is an ancient war machine, a person downloaded into a cylinder and made into a weapon. Gunn, as Alice names him, is hunted by many different parties who want to exploit him for their own purposes. Alice is looking for his home base to possibly extract him from the weapon and give him a body again. The pursuit of Alice and Gunn takes up the entire story, although the climax involves Gunn, grief-stricken by the loss of his family centuries earlier (the time dilation effects of gate travel mean it's only been sixteen days for him) and trying to restart the war he fought so long ago. At the story's climax, Alice manages to talk him into standing down.

Unfortunately, this book really needed a greater length to explore everything the author threw out there, and since it didn't get it, the story feels somewhat shallow as a result. For instance, we never know how Alice feels about being the last surviving human being in the galaxy, and what she does to cope with the loss of her planet and her entire people. She's probably deeply traumatized, and you'd think something like that would be a major plot point, wouldn't you? Like so many other things in this book, it's glossed over. The depiction of the wider galaxy with its many aliens and alien civilizations is also barely touched upon. Again, I realize you didn't have any time for that within the constraints of the novella format. Which is why this book needed to be longer.

As it is, it's more than a little frustrating to read. Hopefully, if the author gets another crack at publication, they will slow down and pick out just a few ideas to explore rather than hauling out the kitchen sink. I think we could have gotten a more interesting story as a result.

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Review: Winter Lost

Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This fourteenth book in the Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series (and one of the few remaining since the urban fantasy boom is all but dead) is one of the better entries in the series, I think. Of course, if you haven't read at least the previous book, Soul Taken, and preferably two or three books further back than that, you will be a bit confused as to what is happening here. Especially since this book deals directly with the consequences of Mercy's battle with the Soul Taker artifact, which has ripped open her soul and damaged her magic. While I still wish the author would include a brief "the story so far" recap at the beginning of her books, at least for this book there is a prologue that, while not exactly an overall recap, does set the stage for this book's storyline.

One thing I do appreciate for this book is additional POV characters, particularly Mercy's husband, the werewolf and pack Alpha Adam Hauptman. Mercy is still our main protagonist, but in this book we into the heads of some of the other characters. There are a great many secondary characters that have built up over the course of the series, and it's nice to spend a little bit of time with some of them.

In this story we meet a couple of frost giants, one of which is working to bring about Ragnarok, the end of the world, by preventing a wedding that has to take place in order to reinforce the so-called Great Spell that prevents the apocalypse from dawning. Mercy's father, the trickster Coyote, sees an opportunity to cure her magical damage, and sets up an elaborate scheme that not only snares Mercy and Adam, but Mercy's half-brother Gary, another of Coyote's children--as well as Baba Yaga and Grandmother Spider, or Asibikaashi. (I must admit I'm a little leery of a white woman writing a Native deity, so I will insert a caveat that I have no idea if Grandmother Spider's depiction here is accurate.) Mercy and Adam end up trapped in a Montana hot springs lodge in the middle of a magic-inspired "storm of the century," and must find a magical lyre belonging to the frost giant Hrimnir. If they succeed, the wedding will proceed and the end of the world will be averted.

The highlight of this book is the relationship between Mercy and Adam. They are loving and supportive of each other, and have some delightful banter. (I also appreciate that Briggs, at least for this series, doesn't do long-drawn-out explicit sex scenes.) The dominant Alpha werewolf Adam is willing to be vulnerable for Mercy, his coyote shifter mate who is almost as easy to kill as a regular human, and has to survive by her speed and her wits.

The only knock I have against this book is that it is a bit slow to get going, and a couple of chapters are taken up by a long conversation between Mercy and another member of the werewolf pack, Mary Jo, about her relationship troubles. I suppose this is meant to tie into Mercy and Adam's situation, but it doesn't really seem to. In fact, the pacing of this entire book is more restrained and deliberate. This doesn't take away all that much from the overall effect in my estimation, but just be aware of it. This is a series where the cumulative effect is perhaps more than the worth of any individual book, but at any rate, I'm glad it's still around.

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Review: Army of One Vol. 1

Army of One Vol. 1 by Tony Lee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My library doesn't have the greatest selection of graphic novels, so when I see something that looks interesting, I tend to snatch it up. This fit the bill, and was pleasantly surprising.

This reminded me a bit of Paper Girls, although we haven't (or haven't yet) starting moving between times--we're moving between universes. Also, instead of four main characters there is one: Carrie Taylor. (Although since there are several multiversal variants of Carrie Taylor, we do still have a Paper Girls-like central group.)

This rather frantically paced story takes place over twenty-four hours (or less) and thoroughly upends Carrie's life: instead of a misfit high school girl worried over her best-friend-sans-crush, and glum over the anniversary of her parents' deaths, she is thrust into a horrifying new reality of ancient sorcerers, alternate universes, several different versions of herself, and being pursued by bald shambling zombie-like creatures. She finds out she is a "shard"--one of several reborn remnants of a sorceress that died centuries ago--or is she? And her beloved grandmother is not really her grandmother, but is perhaps another grown-up "shard" set to watch over her. And Carrie sees the ancient sorceress she supposedly splintered from as a blue ghost following her, and meets the sorceress's brother, who may or may not be her mortal enemy. Also, she gets killed at the end, shot in the head, and is reborn into the brain-dead body of one of her fellow "shards."

This is quite the interesting setup, frankly. The art is bright and vibrant and easy to follow (although the one drawback is that the sorceress Sister Fortune's word balloons are red on black, making them incredibly hard to read). I hadn't heard of this series before, but I'm definitely going to follow it now.

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Recent Notable Stories from Clarkesworld Magazine

 

The August issue of Clarkesworld, with a preposterously cool cover. (Art by Marcel Deneuve.)

It's no secret that I've been a subscriber to Clarkesworld for several years. There's a reason Neil Clarke has won the Best Editor Short Form at the Hugos for two years running, and the reason is that he simply picks good stories. (He also offers print editions of the magazine on their Patreon, which is something I wish more mags would do...) Clarkesworld also regularly publishes translated Chinese SF. Like many other genre magazines, Clarkesworld was hard hit by the recent Amazon Kindle fuckery and is just now managing to get back on its feet. 

So while this magazine is now in far better shape than it was, I still wanted to shout out a few of its recent stories, and encourage you to subscribe. You'll get a quality magazine that deserves your support. 

"Molum, Molum, Molum the Scourge," Rich Larson

Rich Larson is a tremendously prolific short story author, with over a hundred stories published. He also tends to write in the cyberpunk genre, which is not my favorite. However, many times his stories will overcome my dislike of cyberpunk. Which happened in this case: this is a fast-paced tale of Molum, a ten-year refugee from the gladiator pits who is dragged back in one last time. 

"Every Hopeless Thing," Tia Tashiro

Tia Tashiro is an exciting new writer, and this story shows why: Elodie and Skipper are a scavenger pilot/sentient ship partnership, hunting for usable fragments on a future dead Earth. Only they find actual human survivors, living underground for generations after the apocalypse, and offer them the stars--which the survivors turn down. An affecting tale of friendship and self-determination. 

"The Best Version of Yourself," Grant Collier

This is the polar opposite of the feel-good story that precedes it: this is creepy, visceral horror, about a future nanotech treatment that breaks down people's bodies and plants their disembodied brains in the ground, forming a "Nirvana"-like connection of millions of brains. This'll give you nightmares, but it's also unforgettable. The author's note states this story is his first publication, which is amazing. 

"Artistic Encounters of a Monumental Nature," S.B. Divya

This story shows the people of Earth--particularly artists and linguists--coming together to solve a mystery of monuments suddenly appearing in out-of-the-way places, 2001-style. This story speaks of the importance of art to the human condition, and how an alien species might interpret that. 

All these stories are free to read on the Clarkesworld website, but again--please subscribe if you can. (If you want an electronic auto-delivery subscription, Barnes and Noble still offers those for Nook readers.) (And no, neither Neil Clarke or anyone else has asked or paid me to say this. I just recognize how valuable Clarkesworld and other magazine like it are, and wish to see them continue.)

Review: The Stardust Grail

The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I know a lot of people hate the star rating system, but I find it useful. My definitions of my "stars" run the gamut from 1 (hated and likely did not finish) to 5 (loved, amazing, shout the book's virtues from the rooftops; which has happened this year only twice so far, with Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup and Samantha Mills' The Wings Upon Her Back ).

A 3, to me, is middling. It was readable and I liked it, but it has significant flaws. That is very much the case with this book, an archaeological space opera that is trying to be an Indiana Jones-style romp but gets bogged down in plot issues.

Here, our protagonist Maya Hoshimoto is, or was for ten years, a thief: returning stolen alien artifacts to their rightful owners, and also looking for the titular "stardust grail," a possibly mythical item that would save her dear friend Auncle, an octopus-jellyfish alien. After she and Auncle unwittingly transmitted a virus that caused the deaths of an entire clan of aliens on one of their jobs, Maya breaks with Auncle and returns to Earth, trying to resume her education and live a somewhat more normal life. But the lure of traveling the galaxy still beckons, and Auncle comes after her, insisting xe has found a path to the grail, and asking her to do one last job.

Of course we know the "one last job" trope invariably leads to disaster, and so it is in this case. In this future, Maya's friend Auncle is a Frenro, and ancient species that created the Interstellar Web, the network of wormholes that makes space travel possible. There is considerable weight of history to this settling; whole civilizations have risen and fallen before humans ever got to space, and there is a region in the Interstellar Web called the "Dead Sea," consisting of many systems and planets scoured clean of life. (It's definitely a takeoff of Andre Norton's Forerunners.) The setting is one of the most interesting parts of the book, and I wish the author had devoted more time to it.

But as the title indicates, we must have our pursuit of the grail (to be fair, it seems to be the only thing that allows Frenro to reproduce, so the survival of a species is at stake). It is in this pursuit that the aforementioned plot holes start popping up. For instance, in this world there is an alien virus that has infected many species, including humans, and because of it Maya and Auncle can communicate telepathically. This information is casually dropped about a quarter of the way in with no exploration of the ramifications of a psychic link between a human and an alien. Considering that as the story goes on, the Frenro are revealed to have done many reprehensible things, including possibly committing genocide--and Auncle was able to hide that from Maya, even though they have a telepathic link? I don't think so. (Especially since as a character, Auncle seems to have few, if any filters, just spitting out whatever crosses xyr mind.)

What the Frenro are revealed to have done is the bigger and more important plot hole, however. It's not dealt with in this story (although I supposed it could be in the sequel, if there is one). To put it bluntly, the Frenro are....not a nice species, and Auncle knew about most of it. They have a kind of hive mind, called the Whole, and during the course of the chase for the grail Auncle takes Maya and their crew to the Frenro's hidden home world, and there reunites with the Whole. But the Frenro, whose perception of time allows them to see possible futures, have seen that humans are coming to destroy them--and in a Terminator-style loop, bring about the very circumstances of the humans' retaliation.

This is all dumped into the story at the climax, and it's very disappointing. There are some major ethics issues here, and they are not dealt with at all. Maya also forgives her friend far too easily. The Maya-Auncle relationship is well written up to that point, but it seems to me the revelations of the climax should inspire her to take a big step back and perform a major re-evaluation of her friend...and she doesn't do it.

Maybe you can overlook these plot holes and contradictions. I could, sort of. But they did impart a shallowness to the story, to its detriment. So while I liked this in the end, it's certainly not making my list of the best books of the year.

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