Review: Annihilation

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I saw the movie made from this book before reading it, and I must say, this is one of the rare cases where the movie makes more sense. (I would encourage you to watch the film; it stars Natalie Portman and was written and directed by Alex Garland, who also did Ex Machina.) Of course, there were several changes made in the film version, which inevitably happens, but in this case, the changes were for the better.

My biggest gripe with this book, I think, is the vagueness and the stubborn, coy ambiguity. I realize this was intentional on the author's part, but when your characters don't even have names (they're just called "the anthropologist," "the psychologist," and the narrator is "the biologist") it's hard to get invested in them as people. This vagueness also extends to Area X: it's just an ill-defined area where people vanish and weird things happen, and there may be an alien being that the narrator can't even properly perceive. There is a heady sense of wrongness about the whole thing, and the atmosphere is suitably creepy, but when you're not getting any hints about why that might be, it turns the reader off eventually (or at least it did this reader). The biologist gradually realizes everything she has been told about Area X is a lie: no one, least of all the Southern Reach governmental agency who sent them in, has any idea how long Area X has been there or where it came from. Which makes all the expeditions (and there have been far more of those than she was led to believe) something like sacrificial guinea pigs. Including her husband, who volunteered for the eleventh expedition and who came back and eventually died of cancer. (And possibly that wasn't even her husband, but an Area X-produced doppelganger.)

Nearly all of this short book--only 195 pages--takes place in an internal context: inside Area X, inside the "Tower" (the tunnel spiraling into the earth) inside the lighthouse, and inside the seemingly alien being, the Crawler, who turns out to have sucked the lighthouse keeper inside it and is sustaining his body (which is another kind of horror) and finally inside the narrator, the biologist, who has a running series of flashbacks exploring her childhood and her relationship with her husband. Because of this, nothing ever gets answered and we get no real hints of what is going on here. Now, to be fair, perhaps this changes in the subsequent books in the trilogy. However, when I reached the end of this book, I realized I didn't care about any of it, and I am not likely to go any further.

Watch the movie instead. I think you'll get more out of it.

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Review: Faithbreaker

Faithbreaker by Hannah Kaner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the final book in the Fallen Gods trilogy, and it brings the series to a satisfying end. In this secondary fantasy world, gods are spirit beings that become intelligent, awake and aware through the faith of their worshippers. So the more shrines/prayers/offerings/sacrifices/followers a god has, the bigger and more real--and physical--he/she/it becomes. This leads to a few very powerful gods, but more common (and this comes into play at the climax, and saves the day for everyone) are literally thousands of small, unobtrusive gods, including a little antlered, winged god of white lies named Skediceth.

Over the course of the three books, a devastating war between the country of Middren and the fire god Hseth has been carefully set up, and in this book that war comes to its bloody climax. The king of Middren, Arren, attempted to cleanse his country of gods, but was forced to compromise his principles and make a deal with another fire god, Hestra, to keep himself alive (she occupies the space where his physical heart used to be). Arren's commander general, Elogast, left the court in bitterness and disillusionment after the battle of Blenraden and Arren's deal with Hestra, and fell in with a cranky godkiller, Kissen. Kissen came with an unwanted sidekick, a young girl named Inara with mysterious powers and a link to the aforementioned Skediceth. Over the course of the series we learn that Inara is in fact a "halfling," the offspring of a human woman and the god of change, Yusef, made flesh. Inara can talk to other gods and summon them, and as she draws close to Kissen and Elogast, she and Skedi become crucial players in the war against Hseth.

The relationship between Inara and Skediceth is at the heart of the series. Skedi grows from a lying manipulator to a true companion and friend to Inara, and at the climax of this book he sacrifices himself to bring Hseth down. The last quarter of the book is the huge sprawling battle against Hseth and her priests, but with the author's expert pacing and balancing of the characters, my heart was in my throat during the final chapters. There are other character deaths as well, of morally gray, nuanced characters who we have come to know and maybe not love, but at least understand.

Along the way the author grapples with questions of faith, and the murderous behavior that extremes of faith can lead to. All this is relevant to the hold religion and cult leaders have on some people in today's world, and is a taut, gripping and heartbreaking tale in its own right. I really liked this entire series, and heartily recommend it.

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To Sleep, Perchance To Scream: Cold Eternity, by S.A. Barnes

Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This author has carved out a specific, rather exotic niche for herself: sci-fi horror, and not of the supernatural type, either. This story owes a lot to the movie Alien, and also to the urban myth of ancient aliens that landed on our planet in millennia past and helped the Egyptians build the pyramids, or something (which is totally insulting to the Egyptians, insinuating that brown people couldn't have constructed those marvels all by their lonesome). This version of "ancient aliens" is far more terrifying.

Halley Zwick, our narrator, is a former high-class political operative, who saw something she shouldn't and is now on the run. Down to her last credits, she takes an under-the-table job working as a caretaker for the frozen people on board the Elysium Fields. More than a century ago, this ship launched carrying cryogenicaly preserved people, the dying and/or the powerful, gathered together under the aegis of the long-dead tech billionaire Zale Winfeld. Winfeld was a cult leader of sorts, promising immortality and a future cure for fatal diseases. But the reawakening process has never worked, and the ship is circling the solar system on an endless loop, carrying its forever-limbo ghost passengers.

However, working there is just the place for Halley to hide, to escape the scrutiny and pursuit of both her family and the politicians she ran from, with her insider knowledge of election tampering. No matter that the Elysian Fields is full of shadows and strange noises, and Halley is getting more sleep-deprived and stretched thin by the day (since she has to make rounds every three hours, and press a button on the bridge that confirms to the ship's governing board that its passengers are being watched and protected). The person who hired her, Karl, is doing maintenance and remodeling on the ship's lower levels, but that doesn't explain the strange skittering noises Halley hears at night, or the things she sees on the ship's cameras....things Karl insists aren't actually there.

Of course, they are, but the full horror of what is happening on the Elysian Fields takes its time being revealed, and is set up by the author beautifully. Suffice to say that we have alien parasites, a dead-alive tech trillionaire, and the trillionaire's three children who were supposed to be dead decades ago, but who have been uploaded into the ship's AI as a hellish artificial existence. This all comes together in a horrifying, gory, zombified stew in the book's explosive and action-packed final quarter.

Halley's voice very much carries the story. This book shares some similarities with Alien, none more so in the fact that Halley is a young, unassuming, everyday sort of character thrown into terrible circumstances who manages to step up and carry the day. Like Ripley, she does not think she has the strength or the smarts to cope with what is happening, but in this baptism of fire, she finds that she does. She is helped in her struggle by Aleyk, one of Zale Winfeld's uploaded children. There is even a romance of sorts between Halley and Aleyk, even though both know nothing can come of it. But Halley succeeds in freeing Aleyk, destroying the Elysian Fields and giving him the peace of true death.

The author has improved with every book, and in this one, the characterizations and the wonderfully creepy atmosphere of the story is her best yet.

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Review: Fable for the End of the World

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the Acknowledgments, the author states that this book was inspired by Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. The parallels are obvious: like Panem, this is a post-apocalypse dystopia (post-climate-change in this case, although there was evidently some sort of nuclear exchange as well) where the downtrodden masses are kept under control by their addiction to a brutal "game." In this case it is the Gauntlet, where trained teenage assassins pursue people (sometimes children, offered up by their parents, as is the case with the protagonist Inesa) who are so far into debt to the ruling corporation Caerus that they will never get out. The Gauntlet, and its sacrificial Lambs--literally--is livestreamed every few months, to distract the general populace from the misery of their living conditions.

In this future, the United States is apparently no more, having broken up into smaller city-states. The two we are focusing on are New England and New Amsterdam. The former still has nuclear capacity, as evidenced by the irradiated border between the two , which has spawned numerous animal and human mutations. New Amsterdam is the poorer of the two, slowly drowning from sea level rise. This is where Inesa, her brother Luka, and their mother live, in a ramshackle shack perched on stilts to keep it out of the rising water. Luka is a hunter, and Inesa is a taxidermist, preserving the dwindling numbers of non-mutated animals. (Although that is a very ironic definition of "preserving," as she stuffs them after they're dead to serve as a record for when normal animals finally vanish.) Inesa's mother has many problems, including, it would seem, mental illness: she has "sold her soul to the company store" to the point when she reaches the red five-hundred-thousand-dollar credit limit of her debt to the evil corporation Caerus, she offers up her daughter to the Gauntlet to avoid having to run it herself.

(Which of course makes her a cartoon evil antagonist, even worse than Caerus. Fortunately, we don't see her beyond one or two scenes. The author tries to inject some nuance into her character, but that pretty much falls flat.)

Our second protagonist is Melinoe (four syllables, like Chloe), the so-called Angel, or trained assassin, who pursues the Lambs to their deaths. Melinoe has been augmented by Caerus to the point where she's more cyborg than human, including an artificial eye with night vision. But as the story opens, she is suffering full-blown PTSD from her last Gauntlet, where she executed a young girl. She cannot get over this or forget it, despite repeated memory wipes from her handler. In a last-ditch attempt to redeem her, Mel is assigned to Inesa's Gauntlet, to serve as a hopefully audience-grabbing contrast: the ice-cold blond Angel pursuing another young girl her own age. Inesa, with the help of her brother Luka, has thirteen days to evade Melinoe and/or fight her and survive. The Gauntlet takes Inesa and Mel through the wilds of New Amsterdam, where they run into increasingly mutated animals--and mutated humans, called Wends, who attack them both. This forces the girls to work together, and of course the inevitable happens: after Mel is cut off from her handler, by virtue of Luka smashing the comm chip implanted in her temple, she and Inesa end up falling in love.

The romance is handled well enough, I suppose: it's a slow burn, and the sex takes place offstage. Still, it's a bit icky in a way, as Mel has killed how many people?--even though she has been manipulated and brainwashed by Caerus. This relationship takes center stage in the final half of the book, and your view of it will undoubtedly color your overall impression of the book. Mel and Inesa attempt to break free from Caerus, only to discover the cameras they thought were off have been following them all this time, laying bare what has been happening between them to a massive global audience. Another Angel is sent after them, and at the climax, Inesa "wins" by killing this second Angel, who seriously injures Mel. Mel is taken back to Caerus and given a final memory wipe, and then married off to one of the evil old Caerus executives (which is really icky. I could have done without that plot point, for sure). The book ends with Inesa, newly rich from her win, following Mel to New Amsterdam's capital city, where she is hoping to meet up with her love and make Mel remember.

I liked this well enough, but it's not as good as some other dystopian YA I've read. The relationship between Inesa and Luka is a high point, as well as Inesa's grittiness and determination to survive. The worldbuilding could have been better: this doesn't feel as real and lived-in as Panem. It all depends on how much you like Hunger Games knock-offs, I suppose.

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