Review: Rogue

Rogue by Julie Kagawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As others have said, this book is definitely better than the first in the series, Talon. The reason it's better: More dragons, more worldbuilding and less romance.

There is a lot of backstory here I can't wait to find out. How does Talon, the dragon organization, think it can conquer the human world? What are the hidden links between Talon and the Order of St. George, supposedly their greatest, oldest enemy? Who is the Elder Wyrm, and how does he play into this? Finally: What the hell does that cliff-hanging epilogue mean?

This book is written with four first-person points of view, a conceit that sometimes doesn't work. It's a good thing the chapter headings specify who is speaking, because the characters' voices are not as distinct as they could be. That said, the characters are well treated throughout the book. There are four POV characters altogether. Garret is the Perfect Soldier of St. George who commits the unforgivable sin of falling in love with a dragon and questioning the organization that raised him, and untimately his entire worldview and life. Dante is the twin brother of our nominal protagonist, the loyal lickspittle of Talon who would do anything to advance his plans for himself and the organization, including betraying his sister. Cobalt, AKA Riley, is the rogue who is stealing young dragons away from Talon, and we get a good backgrounding on him--his character is deepened and expanded throughout this book. But our protagonist is Ember Hill, the impulsive, reckless hatchling everyone else's emotional arcs revolve around.

This is due in no small part to the dreaded love triangle. This is becoming such a cliche in young adult books nowadays I'm somewhat disappointed Julie Kagawa is resorting to it in this series. However, in this book, as opposed to the first, the romance is much better balanced with the overall storyline. The suspense is ratcheted up and the stakes are higher. Kagawa writes some gripping action scenes, and Ember is not a damsel (or dragonell) in distress, thank goodness. She fights in both her human and dragon forms (and those dragon-on-dragon fights are damned good--hurrah).

I'll definitely check out the third book in the series. There's a lot of threads to tie up here, and I hope Kagawa can stick the landing.

View all my reviews

Review: Chimera

Chimera by Mira Grant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third book in the Parasitology series, and it is by far the best. The plot is tighter and better paced, the characters are more fleshed out (particularly the protagonist), and the author is grappling with several important themes. What makes someone sapient? What makes someone a person? Now that the genetically engineered tapeworms have found a way to take over their hosts, what will be done with them? Are they property...or are they people?

Sal Mitchell, the tapeworm in a human suit and our narrator, is a far better character here than in the previous two installments. Her passiveness and ambivalence irritated me in the first books, but now that I've read the story as a whole, I can see how she's changed. She's not a karate-kicking badass in this book, but she takes charge and stands up for herself and her species. She engineers an escape from her human captors; she calms a huge group of "sleepwalkers" (worms and hosts that have not fully integrated, similar to zombies) with her chimera pheromones; and she leads the rescue effort in the final showdown. The Sal in the first book couldn't have done any of this.

(In fact, the character I'm more irritated with in this book, and in the series as a whole, is Sal's human boyfriend, Nathan Kim. He is a stagnant character, verging on cardboard. He takes the news that his girlfriend isn't human, but is instead a tapeworm buried in a human brain, with an equanimity that simply isn't believable. Certainly he could have been written to come around eventually, but there should have been some conflict shown over the whole idea.)

This is a solid, entertaining book, from one of my favorite authors. It's not as outstanding as some others I've read this year, but it's good.

View all my reviews

Review: Planetfall

Planetfall by Emma Newman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

ARGGHH! This book.

This book is as close to the mental illness that used to be called "split personality" (I believe the current term is "disassociative identity disorder") that I've ever read. It knows it wants to be a science fiction mystery, but it doesn't know whether it wants to be reasonably hard SF or dissolve into mystical bullshit.

Which, unfortunately, it does at the end, squandering whatever goodwill it's managed to build up.

This is the story of Renata Ghali, the geneticist and engineer of the first offworld colony (the planet isn't even given a name), who's hiding a terrible secret. Twenty-two years ago, the colonists aboard Atlas reached their destination. (The star system isn't named, nor if the Atlas is a generation ship, although there are a few hints that this might be the case. Ren does say they could return to Earth if they threw all their time and effort into it, but if they did so, everyone they knew would be dead.) They were led by a charismatic prophet named Lee Suh-Mi, who apparently talked these thousand people into following her to this planet to solve a galactic mystery: did humans originate on Earth, or this planet, and is some being there calling them home? After ingesting the seed of a mysterious plant on Earth, a plant which is not related genetically to any Earth species, Suh claims this is the case.

But something happened during the colonists' first trip to the surface, called Planetfall, spoken with capitalization and a hushed, reverential whisper. Something terrible, something that Ren and the colony's de facto leader, Cillian Mackenzie, have hidden for twenty-two years. Mack has gone even further and turned Planetfall into a religious ceremony, once a year at the base of the planet's alien city (called "God's city") where Suh is still supposed to be communing.

But as is usually the case with these things, the secret inevitably comes out.

This book frustrates me immensely, because there's so much right about it. The characterization, for instance, is sparkling. Ren has a case of OCD/hoarding and is subject to panic attacks, and the author is unflinching in her depiction of it. (Although as the story unfolds and the reader understands just what she has done and kept hidden for all those years, it's not surprising.) The pacing is very good, the plot is a wonderful puzzle piece that fits together with a sure hand, the suspense is skillfully mounted--and I wish I could tear out the last few pages, because the ending undoes everything that has gone before. I literally sat up as I got to the last page and said, "What the hell?"

I mean, Ren climbs to the top of God's city, leaves her body and ascends to the same place the city's makers apparently went (a higher plane of some sort) all those millions of years ago? Leaving behind the mess she made, and abandoning the people she screwed?

ARRGGH, indeed. I don't know what the author was thinking. Unfortunately, this ending was built into the book from the beginning, so I can't say the author wasn't playing fair. But it doesn't sit well with me.

View all my reviews

Review: The Mechanical

The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My definition of science fiction is "what if." What might happen in the future, as well as what could have happened in the past. The official term for the latter is "alternate history," and there are some very good books along these lines. It takes quite a bit of careful thought and detailed worldbuilding; mapping out exactly what happened from the point of divergence, and extrapolating the consequences of this divergence. Not only from the nuts-and-bolts point of view--the divergence itself--but more importantly, its effects on people. It's damned hard to do well.

This book does it very, very well.

It creates a world where Isaac Newton's alchemy not only works, but in fact can be harnessed to produce artificial clockwork beings called Clakkers. This produces a historical upheaval where the Dutch and their relentless, nearly unstoppable army of Clakkers (I mean, the Terminators have nothing on these things) conquers the world. The Clakkers are kept in servitude by the irresistible compulsions and pain of their geasa, the alchemical orders placed on them by their masters. When your body will ignore your mind and obey your masters no matter what, no matter that the intelligence inside the Clakker is screaming over what it is being forced to do...Tregillis describes this horror through two of the three viewpoint characters, and it is harrowing indeed. (We start out with just the Clakkers subject to this slavery, but the stakes are upped about halfway through the book, when a way is found to subject humans to the process as well, turning one of the viewpoint characters into a ruthless assassin.)

The worldbuilding in this book (first of a series) is superb. Thankfully, the information is not dropped as clunky infodumps; it unfolds naturally along with the story, just enough for the reader to mostly understand what is going on at any given time. The focus is on the characters, particularly Jax, a servant Clakker who is purely by accident given his Free Will. The main conflict is between the factions working to free the Clakkers and the factions trying their damndest not only to hold on to them, but expand their capabilities. There are layers upon layers here, of spies, counterspies, doublecrossing, backstabbings, and rather a lot of killing (as well as a bit of squicky brain surgery); it's not as dark and bloody as some books I've read recently, but it's there.

At the same time, the concept behind the Clakkers is inventive and wonderfully detailed, and beautiful at times. There's a sentient Clakker ocean liner (maybe to take the place of the Titanic, since that never seems to have existed in this history), and a sentient airship. Said airship speaks in poetry, and its brief life--it is freed by Jax during his escape from New Amsterdam, only to be shot down twenty-four hours later--is poignant and memorable. These and other details the author uses to bring Clakker society and culture to life made me relax into the narrative, confident that this story is in the hands of someone who knows what he's doing and where he's going.

And what a marvelous and fantastic story it is. This is one of the best books I've read this year, and I can't wait to get my hands on the sequel.

View all my reviews

Review: A Borrowed Man

A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I hadn't read Gene Wolfe before now, and while people more familiar with his backlist would probably suggest better places to start, this one is pretty damn good. Strictly from a craft point of view, the first pages let me know I was in the hands of a master: the simple but not simplistic prose, the smooth unveiling of backstory and worldbuilding without infodumps, the careful and subtle ratcheting up of tension which would occasionally explode in shocking bursts, only to fall back and start climbing up again. It's a quick read, but it's not a light one.

On the surface, this is a science fiction murder mystery, but it's so much more than that. There are layers upon layers to this story, and I think it would only benefit from rereads. Ernest A. Smithe is the titular "borrowed man," the "reclone" of a dead author imprinted with said author's memories. As a "library resource," he is owned by the library, basically a living piece of property without rights. Indeed one of the running themes of the story is his meditation on what he believes will eventually be his fate: when old library books are no longer in fashion and no one checks them out anymore, they are discarded. Only in his case, he will be burned. One of the (many) twists in the book's final chapter is the realization that Smithe has been manipulating events to escape this.

But the gradually unfolding history of this future Earth is also fascinating in its own right: Wolfe describes a world presumably after the coming upheavals of climate change, where the population has been reduced to one billion (by what method is never stated, which is a creepy background note), and humanity realizes it will probably never reach the neighboring planets, much less the stars. Smithe calls it "full humanity's retirement," and although discussion of that is a side point and takes up less than a page, it's still reverbating in my head. The entire book is like this: every so often in the narrative, Wolfe jumps out and gobsmacks you with a pure science-fictional idea. Another instance is when Smithe is riding on a bus and another man (full human) takes his seat, and after Smithe asks him to move and he doesn't, the reclone proceeds to beat the snot out of the full human, kicking him in the head several times for good measure. It's a shocking burst of violence that shows the danger lurking behind the reclone's bland, mild-mannered surface; this is an alien being here, and Wolfe doesn't let us forget it.

The murder mystery, while adequate and a suitable driver of the plot, takes second place to the background, ideas and worldbuilding. This book sneaks up on you, takes hold, and doesn't let go. I don't know if Gene Wolfe is the "it" author he used to be, but if there's any justice, this should be up for some awards.

View all my reviews

Review: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was recommended to me by the commentariat at a site where I hang out a lot, File 770. They've recommended some good books to me in the past, so I thought I'd give this one a try. Unfortunately, it didn't work out.

This book is a sort of mishmash of several genres--fantasy and steampunk mainly, with very British and/or Dickensian overtones (the time period is 1880s London). I think the writer is one to watch; her prose is simple and straightforward, her characters have some depth (and I would pay money for my very own clockwork octopus, named Katsu in the story, with "random" gears which seemed to me quite close to actual intelligence), and the backstory and setup is rather good. Unfortunately the payoff doesn't live up to that setup, and the ending simply fizzles out. Also, the "Watchmaker" of the title, with his psychic power of living more or less in the future rather than the present, is clunky and in the end unbelievable.

Ultimately, I left the book with a general "meh" feeling. Your mileage may vary, of course, but this book did not excite me.

View all my reviews

Review: The Library at Mount Char

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

On occasion, I've heard people say something about a book I never quite understood: "I'm glad I read this book, but I'll never read it again."

I didn't know what they meant, until now.

I don't even know if I'm glad I read this book. I liked it--sort of--and it held my interest, but I'm never going to reread it, and I won't pick up the sequel if there is one. That's not to knock the writer; his prose is good, his book is well paced, and the characters are well drawn. I guess I just don't care to read about the struggles of a family of sociopathic gods, and a plot that is laden with guts and gore and roasting people alive.

The main character, Carolyn, is indeed a sociopath; the author knows it, the reader knows it, and the character certainly knows it. Carolyn, along with eleven other children, are taken in by a sixty-thousand-year-old deity made flesh from the "Third Age," who is searching for his successor. "Father" needs someone to watch over his Library, which is the supernatural, extradimensional font of all knowledge. To choose his successor, Father subjects all the children to terrible things. This backstory makes clear why Carolyn is the way she is, and I suppose I can't blame her; but again, this is another reason why I don't want to read any more about her.

This is the story of the struggle between the children, and other deities from Father's past, and how Carolyn ascends to the position of Librarian, in charge of Father's Library and apparently our universe. The book's ending leaves the plot open for a sequel.

"So...you said 'they're coming.' Who's 'they'?"

"I'm not completely sure yet. My Father had enemies. Some of them are my enemies now, too. They've begun to move against me."

"Dangerous folks? Dangerous like you, I mean."

"Some of them, yeah."

"Hmmm."

"Don't worry," Carolyn said. "I have a plan."

I'm sure she does, but I won't be reading it.






View all my reviews

Review: The Book of Phoenix

The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is weird, messy and complicated. It's billed as a science fiction story, and it certainly is that; the titular main character, Phoenix Okore, is a genetically engineered being, after all. In this future, climate change has advanced to the point that Manhattan Island is partially under water. There's a two-mile-high tree growing out of what's left of Manhattan that was generated by an alien seed. Phoenix is essentially a superhero, a living bomb (with wings!) who can blow herself up, burn herself and everything around her to ash, and regenerate from those same ashes. She does this several times through the course of the story, and the final occasion supposedly brings about the downfall of civilization.

It should be just the kind of book I like, and I did finish it...but I just didn't warm to it. As a protagonist, Phoenix is nicely drawn, as are the supporting characters, and Nnedi Okorafor's prose style is smooth and unobtrusive. I think the basic setup is what spoils the story for me; the suspension of disbelief is stretched just a little too far to accept everything thrown at me, especially when there's another character who sounds like some kind of mystical Obi-Wan sage who can literally walk through solid matter.

Having said that, the framing story, set two hundred years later after Phoenix's apocalypse when an old storyteller in Africa discovers a cache of computers and a chip with Phoenix's story recorded as an oral history, is pretty impressive. In many ways it's the best part of the novel. The exploration of African customs and the power of myth almost carry the day, and certainly elevate the story higher than I might have rated it otherwise.

I'm glad I read it, but unfortunately, I can't mark it down as one of the best books of the year.

View all my reviews

Review: The Traitor Baru Cormorant

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is not for the fainthearted. I'll say that right up front, because it's important, and I don't want to be lashed for not mentioning it. The story is the epitome of the phrase, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," or as the book puts it before the story even starts, "A Promise: This is the truth. You will know because it hurts."

I've never seen an author do that before, but if ever a book lives up to its promise, this one does.

This is the story of Baru Cormorant, and her struggle to take down the evil Empire of Masks from the inside out. The Empire conquered her island of Taranoke, not through the usual way--war--but through trade, a treaty, economics, and the promise of better living. Things like antibiotics, dentistry, and roads. Unfortunately the price paid is high: the island's culture is swallowed up and subjugated, its natural resources exploited and stripped, its children indoctrinated into the Imperial way of thinking. (The Empire of Masks is a particularly nasty piece of work; their society is highly homophobic and subscribes to this world's version of eugenics, i.e., forced marriages and people bred like cattle. Undesirables, like Baru, who is a lesbian [or "tribadist"], are put to the knife--castrated and/or circumcised--reeducated through use of drugs or a more brutal version of our "reparations therapy," or killed altogether.) Baru, a mathematics savant, is trained to be an Imperial Accountant, and is assigned to the country of Aurdwynn. She is determined to free her home, and is convinced that playing the Imperial game and destroying the Empire from within is the only way to achieve her goal.

That description, however, in no way does justice to the brutality and ruthlessness of both this book and its main character. Step by step, we are witness to the creation of a monster, whose obsession leads her to do terrible things. Yet Baru is not a sociopath, not really; she loves, she cries, and she grieves, and she feels every bit of what she is doing, but she will let nothing stand in her way. And so the book's central theme is this: How far will Baru go to get what she wants, and will the time ever come when the ends do not justify the means? What, and who, will she sacrifice to defeat the Empire...and can the Empire ever really be defeated?

It's one of the most complex characterizations I've seen in a long time. I was horrified by Baru, and hated her, but I always understood her, and I couldn't take my eyes off her.

Baru becomes the Fairer Hand, the leader of Aurdwynn's rebellion. (Not by force of arms, mind you, but by force of numbers. She is still the Imperial Accountant, manipulating currencies and people with equal aplomb.) After one decisive battle, where the rebels of Aurdwynn defeat the Imperial troops, I looked at the number of pages remaining and realized the book couldn't wrap up here. This story could not possibly have a happy ending.

It didn't. I won't spoil it, except to remind you that the book's title is The Traitor Baru Cormorant. And yet this book could have ended no other way.

It's dark and disturbing, and if you must have optimism in your fiction, you need to stay far away from this one. But if you read this story, it will haunt you for weeks to come. I gave it four stars because of the awkwardness of the first few chapters, dealing with Baru's childhood; once she reaches Aurdwynn, the book blasts on all cylinders.

View all my reviews

Review: Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology

Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology by Ann VanderMeer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There's a nice trend on Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites, of crowdfunding anthologies based around specific themes that might not find a home in traditional publishing. This book is a good example. I participated in its Kickstarter, and I'm proud that my money helped this book find a home in the world.

It's a very professional effort, as would be expected from the editing team of Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. Unfortunately, all the stories are from years past and cannot be considered for this year's awards, although the anthology itself could be nominated for, say, the Locus Awards. It would make a worthy nominee, as far as I'm concerned.

Some of my favorites:

"The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.," L. Timmell Duchamp--Margaret A. is so feared by the US government that the Constitution is amended to silence her, and she is held in a one-person concentration camp with no contact with the outside world, save for a monthly visit from a journalist. We never find out exactly what she says, and that's not the point. (It is mentioned, though, that Margaret A. is a black woman, which is rather telling, even more so now than when the story was written.) The story is not really about Margaret A., but rather the journalist who speaks with her, and who discovers she cannot live with the status quo any longer.

"The Grammarian's Five Daughters," Eleanor Arnason--a delightful, beautifully written fantasy about the power of words (quite literally the parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions) and the women who wield them.

"The Screwfly Solution," James Tiptree, Jr (aka Alice Sheldon)--a classic of the genre, just as disturbing now as it was nearly forty years ago.

"The Evening and the Morning and the Night," Octavia E. Butler--I've read a lot of Butler's stuff, but somehow I missed this story. It's tremendous.

"Tales from the Breast," Hiromi Goto--the premise of this story sounds absurd, but man, the ending bites.

"Northern Chess," Tanith Lee--a lush fantasy story that hinges on a similar reveal to Eowyn's "I am no man!" from The Return of the King.

But my favorite of the bunch, as dark and depressing as it is, is Susan Palwick's "Gestella," which asks a simple question: what happens when a female werewolf, with canine aging patterns, falls in love with a human? For modern sensibilities, the beginning is a bit squicky, but the story is a powerful treatise on how women are often used and discarded as they age. And the ending is just...oh my God.

There were a couple of stories I liked less, but the general quality is quite high. You won't go wrong with this collection.

View all my reviews

Review: The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've never read any of N.K. Jemisin's work before, but now I'll start collecting her books.

This book is fantastic. I'll get that out of the way right now; it's one of the best I've read this year. It's a very dense book, in plot and character, worldbuilding and writing, and it would definitely reward multiple reads. (In fact, as I was going through it, and peeling back one more layer of the onion Jemisin has so expertly constructed, I found myself returning to the prologue and rereading it, and picking up on the nuances I couldn't understand before. Which I did again just now, after finishing the book. Unfortunately, I have to return this copy to the library, but I'll get my own soon enough.) What I find interesting is that it's being marketed as fantasy, and to me, it's really not. This is not to say I disdain fantasy; I loved Naomi Novik's Uprooted, after all. But this book, while it might have some nominal fantasy trappings, has a very strong science-fiction undertone. Just as an example, the inhabitants of Jemisin's world understand the theory of plate tectonics, the cities have electricity generated by geothermal and/or hydroelectric means, and they also possess the ability to build massive floating (possibly using anti-grav?) crystal obelisks--the purpose of which isn't hinted at until the very last line of the book! (Talk about a cliff-hanger. I immediately went to Amazon to see if I could pre-order the next book, which isn't even finished yet.)

The structure of this book is complex. There are three distinct storylines, and alternating chapters following what you at first believe are three characters--but you gradually realize this is the story of one woman, told at three different times in her life. The oldest version of the protagonist is named Essun, and her chapters are written in second person, present tense. (I've written a story in second person. It's not easy; that sort of narrative is distancing and suffocatingly close all at the same time, and the writer has to make the "you" into a distinct character. Jemisin does this very well.) The earlier versions of Essun, under different names, are written in third person, present tense. Fortunately, the chapter headings make clear which character we'll be focusing on. All this juggling of storylines may sound a bit precious, but it's absolutely necessary to the plot; we have to see why and how Essun has become the person she is, to understand the choices she makes.

The worldbuilding is equally impressive. I've come to the conclusion that, for me, world-building is one of the most important parts of an SFF book; if I can't believe in the world presented, if it doesn't make sense, I get thrown right out of the narrative (and the book tends to hit the wall). Jemisin's world has the weight of thousands of years of history and geology, and carries that weight very well. There are no infodumps. The history/geology is woven in with rare skill, and the story never drags. There are two appendices at the back of the book--a timeline and glossary of terms--that help explain things, which I appreciated, but most readers will be able to follow along anyway. The prose is crisp and clean and deceptively simple, and when Jemisin hits an action sequence, it's like a knockout punch.

This is a very dark story, however, so be warned. The characters never seem to catch a break. There are themes of prejudice and hatred, and a society that oppresses the very people it needs for its survival. There are important questions asked as to how far a person will go to accept something that they know is not right, if they believe accepting the wrong is necessary for their survival, and how and when they will finally break free. Essun is asking those questions, and is on the verge of breaking free, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

View all my reviews

Review: The Water Knife

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was originally going to give this book four stars. I enjoyed it immensely, but I didn't think it was quite up to the lofty standards of Naomi Novik's Uprooted. Still, I kept thinking about the story, and the characters, and Paolo Bacigalupi's chillingly possible near-future world, and I realized if the book has stayed with me that much, it deserves the final star.

So, five stars it is.

This book hits home for me because I live in Arizona, and it is set (mostly) in Phoenix. But it's the Phoenix, and the America, of twenty or thirty years from now, when climate change is really kicking in. Among other things, there are seawalls around Manhattan and Miami; EF6 tornadoes ravaging Chicago (currently the range tops out at EF5, with windspeeds measured between 261-318 mph; EF6, currently rated "inconceivable,"would go beyond that); and hurricanes slamming the Gulf Coast to the point where thousands of people are fleeing Texas, only with the recently passed State Sovereignty Act, states such as California, New Mexico and Nevada are not allowing them in. Water is more valuable than oil or gold, and the so-called Queen of the Colorado, Catherine Case, is employing "water knives" (actually shadowy beyond-the-law assassins) to defend Nevada's water rights. In Phoenix, massive dust storms, far worse than anything we experience today, are slowly burying the city, which is now stuffed with Texas refugees (called "Merry Perrys"--methinks the author doesn't much care for the former Texas governor) and various other factions fighting each other over water. The world is complicated and fascinating, and scary as hell to me, because I can see all of it coming true. (As an example, the day after I finished this book, there was a front-page article in the Arizona Republic detailing the fight over the Colorado River water and the future of the Southwest amidst the ongoing drought.)

You could call this book "climatepunk," I suppose, but at its heart it's a near-future SF thriller. What sets it apart from most potboiler thrillers, however, is its characters. There are three viewpoint characters--Angel Velasquez the water knife, Lucy Monroe the Phoenix journalist, and Maria Villarosa, the Texas refugee who unwittingly gets dragged into the whole mess and plays a surprising role in the end--and these characters are very well done. Each has believable backgrounds, well-thought-out motivations, and a distinct arc, stretched over alternating chapters that fit together like a series of interlocking puzzles. The pacing is excellent and the stakes are high. The ending is a bit abrupt, at least to me, and while it does leave things open for a sequel (something along the lines of "Do they make it to Las Vegas with those senior-to-God water rights, or does California capture them instead?"), the current storyline is for the most part wrapped up.

This book will make you think, and it should. I don't think the author really wants to be known as a prophet, but if the US doesn't get its collective head out of its ass regarding climate change, I think he's going to be more on target than anyone wishes.

View all my reviews

Review: Uprooted

Uprooted by Naomi Novik
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my second five-star read of the year. I think I like this better than Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory, and I've been raving about that to whoever would listen. Bear's book is an exhilarating, fun romp with a memorable cast of characters. This book, while it does have its comedic moments (especially in the beginning, with the clash of personalities between our protagonist Agnieszka and the wizard), is much darker. So much so, in fact, that while the protagonist is seventeen, and on the surface you might think the book is for young adults, I wouldn't give it to a younger teenager to read. Especially in the final third of the story, all the carefully woven plot threads explode into a heart-attack-inducing burst of action. There are fights, often gruesome deaths, fleeing, on-the-edge-of-your-seat rescues, a magical siege of a tower that rivals anything Tolkien produced, and a final desperate trek into an antagonist as unique as anything I've read in ages--the poisonous, sentient, killer Wood.

Let's put it this way: This is not a Disneyfied fairy tale, and it's definitely not for the faint-hearted.

Our heroine is Agnieszka (pronounced Ag-NYESH-kah according to the Author's Note). She is an endearingly klutzy young girl who, by virtue of the year of her birth, has to participate in the ten-year ritual of the Dragon-born. The Dragon is the wizard who protects the valley where Agnieszka lives from the Wood, the magical forest on the border between Agnieska's country and the next. There is a great deal of backstory to this Wood, woven in so expertly that it never slows the story down, and indeed this backstory emerges as the prime driver of the plot. (Naomi Novik's worldbuilding for this book is just fantastic. I am in awe.) Agnieszka is not particularly worried about the Dragon's choosing, because everyone knows that the wizard will take her best friend, Kasia, an accomplished blond beauty who stands in stark contrast to Agnieszka's clumsy untidiness. Of course, as soon as I say that, y'all know what happens, don't you? The Dragon comes, tests all the girls...and chooses Agnieszka instead.

Thus begins the epic journey of Agnieszka learning she is a witch, albeit an intuitive, unconventional one who throughly offends the Dragon's notion of what a magic worker should be. The Dragon, whose name we later learn is Sarkan, is the epitome of a scowling, grumpy wizard shouting at everyone, "Get off my lawn!" He comes across a bit nasty at first, yelling at poor lost Agnieszka, whose world has just been turned upside down. But the deeper we get into the story, and the more we learn about the Dragon's task--guarding the valley, and the entire country, from the gradual encroachment of the Wood--the more sympathy we feel for him. His job is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and he is the only one who can do it. This naturally does not inspire a personality of sweetness and light.

The antagonist here, the Wood, is a stroke of genius. Not a person per se, but a magical forest on the far edge of the valley. This forest spits out monstrous mutated animals, and drags people inside either to their deaths, or to be swallowed up by evil heart-trees, or releases them filled with a corruption that leads the victims to murder. The Wood's brooding, malevolent presence is one of the scariest things I have read in a long time, and it rings true on every page. (And for the contrarian who asks, "Why in the hell don't all the people in the valley just leave?"--that is dealt with. Turns out, there is a good reason.)

Because Agnieszka is a witch, she has to team with the Dragon to fight the Wood. There is a great deal more to this layered, complex plot, which is why the book is 435 pages long. None of it is boring, and all of it is stupendously well-written. We have the power of female friendship (Agnieszka and Kasia), Agnieszka's love for her family and her love for the valley (it's her home and she's not leaving); court politics; war; a back-burner romance between Agnieszka and the Dragon; and finally, after the Wood's final defeat, Agnieszka's finding her purpose and her place. She will stay in the valley and she will heal the Wood, even if it takes all of her very long witch-life.

This is one reason why, for me, the ending was so satisfying. The Dragon leaves for the Capital to mop up the mess (to put it mildly; mass slaughter was involved, which is why this book is so dark) the Wood made of the king's court, and Agnieszka doesn't know when, or if, he is coming back. No matter: she has her job, the gradual cleansing of the Wood, and she is not at all dependent on the Dragon. Then the Dragon, all grumpy prickly mortification, returns.

Happiness was bubbling up through me, a bright stream laughing. He'd come back. "When did you arrive?"

"This afternoon," he said stiffly. "I came to receive the taxes, of course."

"Of course," I said. I was sure he'd even gone to Olshanka for the tribute first, just so he could pretend that was the truth for a little bit longer. But I couldn't really bring myself to pretend with him, not even long enough for him to get used to the idea; my mouth was already turning up at the corners without my willing it to. He flushed and looked away; but that wasn't any better for him, since everyone else was watching us with enormous interest, too drunk on beer and dancing to be polite. He looked back at me instead, and scowled at my smile.

"Come and meet my mother," I said. I reached out and took his hand.

This ending was just perfect. The enemy has been defeated, and if there is still rebuilding to be done, you know these people's lives will go on, and there is every reason to hope those lives will be happy ones.

This book is simply marvelous. It's beautifully written, the magic system is unique, the worldbuilding is wonderful, and the characters are pitch perfect. It's my best read so far this year.

View all my reviews

Review: Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us

Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us by David Neiwert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the best nonfiction book I have read this year, and one of the best I have read in quite some time.

The author obviously has a great appreciation and love for orcas, and his personal anecdotes of various encounters he has had with them add a great deal to his book. There are also fascinating chapters about orca evolution and retellings of Native myths about the animals. Killer whale intelligence and possible sapience is discussed, along with their incredibly close social structure and the fact that they really do have another sense (echolocation) that humans cannot comprehend.

Unfortunately, a great deal of this book is terribly depressing. Neiwert makes a convincing case that these majestic animals should not be in captivity at all, and the way various marine parks (cough *SeaWorld* cough) treat them is tantamount to the deliberate torture of an intelligent species. (For instance, the calves are routinely separated from their mothers when they are a year old, when in the wild calves stay with their mothers and their pod their entire lives.) Orcas in captivity also do not live as long as those in the wild, despite SeaWorld's blatantly false assertions to the contrary. (Yes, I have seen the movie Blackfish, and my heart goes out to the whale profiled in the film, Tilikum. In my opinion, his captivity has left him psychotic, and that's why he killed three people, including his trainer Dawn Brancheau.) In the wild, killer whales swim up to a hundred miles a day; confining them to tanks, even million-gallon ones, is equivalent to confining a human to a bathtub. For life. Orcas never attack people outside of captivity, or each other; their highly social, cooperative natures forbid it.

There are also chapters on the people who have devoted their lives to studying these animals, and attempting to preserve their numbers, in particular the declining Southern Resident population. The possibility of returning some captive orcas to the wild is discussed, focusing on the story of Keiko, the whale featured in the movie Free Willy. All of it is very well done--the book reads like a novel--and all of it, at least to me, is fascinating. Be prepared to be pissed, though, especially at SeaWorld. I for one will never darken their doors again.

View all my reviews

Review: Dove Arising

Dove Arising by Karen Bao
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wish Goodreads had a little more graduated ratings system. This book didn't quite make it up to a 3 for me, but it's not a 2, either. Some parts of it were more than just okay, and others weren't. It is a very flawed book, however, and ultimately it didn't excite me enough to want to read the sequel (and with the abrupt, unsatisfying ending, there will definitely be a sequel).

This story is set three hundred years in the future, when Earth has undergone drastic changes due to global warming--the current superpowers, and even countries as far as I could tell, are no more, replaced with floating cities, and there is a functioning colony on the Moon. The people on the Moon are the descendants of the scientists who left Earth when all the shit started coming down (illustrated in a rather heavy-handed way by their swearing "so help you Reason" during a trial, over a holographic copy of The Origin of Species). Religion is banned and the scientific process is the cornerstone of their society. They also have a nice little war going with the floating cities of Earth, with raids back and forth over...what, I couldn't exactly tell, other than the reveal far into the book that the Moonbases are not quite the self-sustaining things their inhabitants always thought they were.

Our protagonist is Phaet Theta (nobody has any individual family names; their last names are derived from the apartment complexes where they live), a fifteen-year-old girl. Her life is disrupted by her mother becoming ill and being dragged off to medical isolation. The family cannot afford to pay for her treatment and face being banished to Shelter, the Moon's equivalent of an internment camp. To spare her brother and sister this fate, Phaet joins the Militia, hoping to earn a high enough rank to pay for her mother's treatment--and eventually her bail, as we come to find out that her mother has actually been arrested for what's called "disruptive print." Even later, in the wildly uneven and disjointed back half of the book, Mira Theta is shown to be the leader of Dovetail, a revolutionary underground group rebelling against the nice little dictatorship the six-person Committee, the ruling council, has going.

Honestly, there are a fair amount of good ideas here, thrown around in a completely half-assed manner. The character of Phaet is one of the better parts of the story; her love for her family drives her to enlist in Militia, its youngest-ever trainee. The first part of the book, with the storyline of Phaet's military training, is to me the stronger half. But once she graduates (and, implausibly, is given the rank of Captain) the whole thing starts to go off the rails. The writing becomes clunky, the characterization diverges wildly from what has already been established, and the pacing goes wonky. Once Phaet's mother is bailed out of Penitentary, her storyline is forced to the forefront, and then we have the reveal of her position as this rebel group leader just after she is executed. Immediately thereafter, Phaet and her fellow Militia trainee, Wes, have to go on the run (and we find out Wes is actually an Earthbound spy), and Phaet winds up leaving her brother and sister behind to flee to Earth.

It's too much, crammed into too tight a space, and unfortunately it turned me off to the entire story. The author's bio notes that she started writing the book when she was seventeen, and it certainly reads that way. I suppose Dove Arising was good enough to get published (barely) but to me, the author needs a few more years of writing and life experience before she can really pull off something like this.

View all my reviews

Review: Storm Siren

Storm Siren by Mary Weber
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I tried with this book. Honest to Dogg, I really did. But the clunky writing and terrible metaphors finally caught up with me about three-quarters of the way through, and I threw it down and said, "That's it." I'd nearly hurled it against the wall at the halfway mark; I'd taken it to work to read on my breaks, and threw it on the table and said, "This book is stupid!" But I picked it up again (mainly because I didn't have anything else to read) and gave it one more try.

No more. I'm home now, and I have two more library books to get through, plus my own ever-expanding To Be Read pile. Life is just too short.

The sad thing is that there is a good book here struggling to get out, if only the editor had been a little more diligent. The main character is well drawn. The setting is rather generic Fantasyland (though the story reminded me, more than a little, of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Stormqueen). What completely fractured my suspension of disbelief is the uneven writing--for the most part, the action scenes are good, but the author's descriptions, metaphors and similes are terrible; I don't know why her editor didn't clamp down on this--and the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is lacking to say the least; cliched and not thought out. Especially regarding the ecosystem of her world: there are "ferret-cats" and "panther-monkeys" (groan) and the final deal-breaker for me--flesh-eating horses.

For crying out loud. That simply does not work. And it's not as though said deer-chomping mounts even play a main role in the plot (at least, as far as I read) which makes the whole thing even more irritating. If you want your readers (or at least this reader) to accept your story and your world, you've got to get these background details right, or the reader is hurled out of your book. If you want a savage carnivorous riderbeast, fine. Just don't make it a horse.

Bah. There's got to be better books than this.

View all my reviews

Review: "Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial," by Kenji Yoshino

This book is the story of one of the cases that led to Obergefell vs. Hodges, the recent Supreme Court decision that legalized marriage equality in all fifty states. Hollingsworth v. Perry is the trial that resulted in the striking down of California's Proposition 8, the citizens initiative that banned same-sex marriage. 

Because the author is a Professor of Constitutional Law, he gets pretty deep in the legalese weeds here. No doubt some will find this boring; I found it fascinating, and the story of the trial reads like a novel. The author discusses the plaintiffs (two same-sex couples denied a marriage license), the proponents, the lawyers behind the marriage-equality movement and the history of the movement, the lawyers who brought Perry to trial (including Republican Ted Olson, who ironically won the horrid Citizens United decision before the Supreme Court), and the judge. This all takes place in Part I, a necessary set-up to the trial itself.

Part II delves deep into the trial, including excerpts from the transcript. The author thoroughly explores the arguments put forth by both sides, and explains how the arguments against same-sex marriage simply do not hold up. The proponents' witnesses were, to put it mildly, lacking, and the plaintiffs made their case with a mixture of expert witnesses and people relating their lived experiences. The plaintiffs ultimately prevailed, but of course the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, where it was taken up along with United States vs. Windsor, the case that struck down DOMA (the federal Defense of Marriage Act). The California judge's ruling in Perry was also upheld at that time, albeit on narrow grounds that applied to the state of California only; but in that ruling (along with Windsor) the seed was planted that led to the final victory just last month. 

The author, Kenji Yoshino, does a very good job of explaining torturous legal minutiae and making it understandable for the layperson, and constructing an absorbing narrative. Especially interesting, to me, was his championing the process of the trial in and of itself, and how cross-examination can strip arguments to their bare essentials and create a record that exposes their faults and virtues for all to see. One paragraph I particularly liked:

Finally, trials separate fact from belief. At least in the United States today, the trial requires an innately secular form of argumentation. As such, it operates as a sieve that filters out religious motivations for a law. The Perry trial showed that opposition to same-sex marriage is largely rooted in conservative religious beliefs. Beliefs move people to engage passionately in a cause, and passion can often persuade. Yet as the trial showed, a passion is not a reason, much less a reason for a law. (p. 269)

This is good too:

Finally, a trial is, as one reporter said of Perry, a "great and theatrical classroom." Olson later reflected that Perry "was an enormous education to everybody who was in that courtroom, even those who had been laboring in the vineyard for gay rights." Though the proceedings were not broadcast, Perry has generated numerous books, articles, TV pieces, a documentary, and a play, all of which have extended the trial's reach. While the purpose of a trial is justice for the parties, not public education, trials have been known to provide that education as a collateral benefit. (p. 274)

The author ends the book with a ringing endorsement:

So let me pre-commit myself: Next time such a legal controversy arises that implicates thorny "legislative" facts, let it go to trial. Let us try whether women regret their abortions, whether guns deter crime, or whether climate change is occurring. And let the product of the trial be disseminated throughout all forums in which the debate is taking place. For me, the Perry trial explored not one, but two civil ceremonies--the ceremony of marriage and the ceremony of the trial. I have come to see that my conviction about the importance of the civil trial are just as consequential as my convictions about marriage. And so I say again--for the next great legal controversy that turns on key legislative fact: Let there be a trial.

Everyone knows how terribly flawed the American judicial system is, but reading this book will revive one's faith in it, even for a little while. This is an admirable accomplishment. It's also more meaningful now, in light of marriage equality's ultimate victory.

Review: "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," by Sherman Alexie

 My rating: 2 of 5 stars

 I decided to give this book a try mainly because I'm slogging through a lot of bad-to-mediocre work in reviewing the nominees for the 2015 Hugo awards, and I needed something that was completely different.

This certainly fit the bill. Sherman Alexie is a Native American writer of considerable acclaim who falls on the "literary" side of the spectrum. A couple of these stories have a whiff of magical realism about them, and one in particular, "Distances," is a sort of whacked-out post-apocalyptic tale. Nevertheless, Alexie is definitely not a science-fiction or fantasy writer, at least not in this collection. He is, however, a sharp observer and incisive portrayer of the desperation, alcoholism, betrayal, defeat, and despair that dominate the lives of his characters. (The author admits in the introduction that the book is "thinly disguised memoir." I got that impression from several of the stories--they just had the feel of "this stuff actually happened in real life." Which is quite the feat, now that I think about it.)

The twenty-four stories here revolve among several recurring characters at different points in their lives. They're not stories in the sense I'm used to, that is, a Protagonist with a Goal navigating Obstacles (other than the Native American goal of survival, I suppose, and its Obstacle the entire white supremacist American society). Most of them are character sketches and vignettes. The only one that has something resembling a plot is, not coincidentally, my favorite of the bunch, "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor." In this story, which is admittedly rather bleak, Jimmy One-Horse discovers he has terminal cancer and drives his wife away with his unrelenting black humor about the whole thing. There is a series of flashbacks illuminating his relationship with his wife Norma, and at the end, she returns to see him through his upcoming death. (Laid out like that, this story doesn't seem to have very much of a "plot" either, but it totally works.)

Sherman Alexie is a lovely, understated writer, with metaphors that can sucker-punch you to the floor in a few words. Some of these stories were written when he was quite young--I would have appreciated brief introductions to each story, explaining them in the context of his life. If you're wondering why I only gave this two stars: the book wasn't bad,  and I admired the writing. In the end, it just wasn't for me.

Review: "The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry," by Jon Ronson

(Note: Don't worry, I am still slogging through the Hugo nominees. After that last abomination, however, I needed a bit of a break.)

This is one weird little book. It feels short, even though it's 272 pages. I think that's because the author uses white spaces like I use the words "and" and "the"; there's usually at least one, if not more, per page. This tends to disrupt the flow of the narrative a bit, but since he is examining the so-called "madness industry," I suppose it fits right in.

This is a little literary mystery that is never really solved, and which leads our admittedly anxious, jittery author into a side tangent involving psychopaths and other forms of mental illness. (He does admit the terms "psychopath" and "sociopath" are interchangeable, but I believe the latter term is the one currently favored.) Several people are mailed a book entitled Being or Nothingness with parts of the pages cut out, with no indication of who mailed it or why. The author's attempt to figure this out leads him in several different directions, and finally to a study of various forms of "crackpots."

There's some scary forms of mental illness in these chapters, including a bit on the Church of Scientology that should make you run screaming in the opposite direction; a history of psychiatric diagnostics that involves such things as "nude psychotherapy sessions" in a pool, complete with a photo; the man, Bob Hare, who came up with the actual 20-point "psychopath checklist" (yes, such a thing does exist); the CEO of a corporation who closed plants and fired employees and "redefined a great many psychopathic traits as Leadership Positives"; an asshole named David Shayler who denies that the London 7/7 terrorist attacks really happened (I've run into his whackjob cousins in this country, who deny that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre took place), and who provides the best paragraph in the book:

"She won't look at the evidence," interrupted David. "I'm getting the same sort of vibe off you here, Jon. A viewpoint arrived at without evidence is prejudice. To say Muslims carried out 7/7--those three guys from Leeds and one from Aylesbury--to say they did it is RACIST, Jon. It's racist. It's racist. You're being a RACIST to Muslims if you think they carried out that attack on the evidence there."

There was a short silence.

"Oh, fuck off," I said.

Heh. The author's fragmented, jittery writing style tended to grate on me after a while, but at that moment I felt like standing and applauding.

The most interesting chapter is Chapter 10, which talks about both the overmedicating of children (for supposed ADHD and bipolar disorder), and the tremendous expansion of the listed mental illnesses in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  Some of them sound more than a bit specious, and even the person who helped write that book admits he may have made a mistake on some of his criteria. This is sobering, and scary to think about.

The book ends with the author receiving his own copy of Being or Nothingness, with the same pages chopped out as all the other copies. He emails the person he believes is doing this (although I'm not sure he really knows for certain) and there the book ends. We've come full circle, and we're just as vague and mixed-up as when we started.

That's the whole point, I suppose.

Review: Karen Memory

Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I've never read much steampunk until now. I knew the genre existed, knew that it involved an alternate version of history with airships and steam-powered clockwork automatons, generally set in Victorian England. Cherie Priest, I know, is a prominent steampunk author, though I haven't read any of her Clockwork Century novels (though I have read, and loved, her ode to H.P. Lovecraft, Maplecroft).

Unfortunately, now I'm rather spoiled. Because if any steampunk fiction tops this book, it had better be bloody fantastic.

This book is so many things. It's an alt-history Western that includes real people, specifically the African-American US Marshal, Bass Reeves. It's a meditation on family: the family you make for yourself rather than the one you're born with (the protagonist, Karen, is an orphan, and since most of the main characters are prostitutes, and this is set in the Old West around 1880, most of their biological families are non-existent). It's subtly but unabashedly feminist; Karen mentions not being able to vote and how deeply she resents this, and has several snarky asides about the mayor of their town, Rapid City, being able to walk all over the owner of Karen's "sewing establishment," Madame Damnable, simply because he has a prick. It's an ode to the incredible bonds women can form, and it's such a delight because almost all of the main characters are women, including a transgender or perhaps intersex woman. It's a wonderful slate of diversity; the "crib girl" Karen falls in love with is an Indian (as in being from India, although there is a prominent Native American character, and of course the main male character is the aforementioned Marshal Reeves), and it's one of the very few books I've ever read where the author makes a point of mentioning whether a character is white as well as when a character is not-white. This simple thing jarred me tremendously, because it drives home how much white is the default in our fiction. That is not the default in this book, and I appreciate that more than I can say.

But more than that, I can sum up this book in three words. This is a Rollicking. Good. Story.

I mean, what's not to love? There's Karen's marvelous, distinctive voice that sucks you in from the very first sentence; there's a mystery; there's a steam-powered Surgery Machine and a steam- and kerosene-powered Giant Singer Sewing Machine (which becomes very important indeed in the climax); there's a gaudily decorated airship; there's political machinations; there's an early steampunk version of the Cold War, complete with Russian spies who are plotting to return Alaska to its rightful owners; there is a fantastic homage to Jules Verne and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with an octopus-inspired submersible which is, I daresay, even more badass than the Nautilis; and last but not least, the climax involves Karen donning her multi-armed Singer sewing machine like female bodyarmor and going out to fight the bad guys with it! (This sounds ridiculous, I know. Trust me, given the entire context of the book, it isn't, and by that time I was turning the pages too fast, and chortling too loudly, to care.)

As far as I am concerned, this book is Hugo-worthy, and given that I am brandishing my brand-new voting rights for next year, I plan to nominate this book (along with others, I'm sure) for Best Novel.

Not to wade into the Hugo mess too much, but I must say this. To oversimplify greatly, the complaint is that the "message" books have overwhelmed the "story" books. I think that is nonsense, but in any case, this book, in my opinion, disproves that entire notion. I for one am damned tired of Boring Generic White Male Protagonists Doing Manly Things. Variety is, as they say, the spice of life. In this case, as far as I am concerned, the Rollicking Good Story came first, and the diverse cast is the frosting on top of a well-baked cake--and the entire book is the richer, and the better, for it.

For the geeks among us, just think of IDIC. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Science fiction can only benefit when we challenge ourselves to think in this manner, as Ms. Bear has done.

I salute the author. I think she's just added herself to my Auto-Buy List.



View all my reviews