1982191066
9781982191061
1982191066
3.63
1,767
Apr 09, 2024
Apr 09, 2024
it was amazing
I don’t know what took me so long to discover the work of Sarah Langan, I was late to the party, but perhaps the perfect time to do so. Shifting from
I don’t know what took me so long to discover the work of Sarah Langan, I was late to the party, but perhaps the perfect time to do so. Shifting from straight horror (a genre where she earned a couple of Bram Stoker awards) to social-themed Science Fiction is a move I can relate to. Langan thankfully for her, is having better success than me. Besides natural award-winning storytelling chops, it is evident that she works very hard on these novels. One of those writers who was just born to do this.
Good Neighbors was a novel I pretty much never stopped thinking about. With a Monsters are Due on Maple Street (Classic Twilight Zone episode) meets Cli-fi - Langan created a lane for herself to dominate. Science fiction studies professor Liza Yaszek called her book about women writing SF Galactic Suburbia, one reason for that label is pioneer writers like Judith Merril for example were writing stories about families and rich characters the men were writing about. Langan is dominating the SF suburbia right now. I live in a city, and I am not doing the suburbs so I can’t comment on how accurate or inaccurate the commentary is but Sarah Langan is becoming SF’s critic of the burbs in general.
A Better World has a little Stepford Wives feeling because it is centered on a “perfect” community set in a future already radically changed by climate change. Linda is our POV character, and she is excited when her family is given a chance to move to Plymouth Valley a corporate town in late 21st-century America. The outside world is mostly a mystery and according to the subtle world-building that comes early in the novel. “It was the era of the Great Unwinding. The institutions, laws, and even the bridges and roads that people had come to depend on were falling apart. Everything got automated, but broken automated.” Langan gives us a nugget of the collapse, but little of the day-to-day life. On this early page, we get the same method of talking about The climate crisis. “The weather stopped making sense. Fires and storms raged. Blackouts rolled through the country like waves at a King's Stadium Dodger game. A lot of people stopped making sense, too. They were angry and mad and sad all the time, they were indignant all over overall they'd lost.”
Langan gives us plenty of world-building once we get to the corporate town, and it only adds to the mystery that we get hints about how unpleasant the rest of the world is. This is done mostly in characters expressing how lucky they are to live in Plymouth Valley.
“OK, it's bad period because you want a company job, and you want to live in a town like Plymouth Valley. Is that what I'm hearing?”
Josie looked at her with exasperation. “I don't want it! I have to. There's nothing outside. No place to go except a company.”
It effectively accomplishes the horror novel narrative trick of explaining why the characters would stay. Given that there is also a pagan wicker man-ish feel to the community in PV. It also reminded me of the Olvia Wilde-directed movie Don’t Worry Darling, but unlike that movie, A Better World works both before and after the reveal. This novel works better because it feels more naturally weird, and is so much better told.
Linda and her daughter Josie while happy to be there start to see through it quickly. but much of the story drive is built around how the family TRIES to fit in. There are hilarious moments like when Linda brings another family donuts and is lectured that she should’ve brought Sourdough. “When you visit, you're supposed to bring homemade sourdough. Something that takes effort. No one brings this sweet crap…”
That is probably the way all families approach the suburb, Hip the son in the family is fitting in, but Josie the daughter is struggling. Some of the most heartfelt moments are times when Linda’s heart aches for the struggles of her kids. Josie’s struggles on the soccer field highlight this.
A Better World will be marketed as a thriller, a satire, or social commentary. It is all those things and that is one of the reasons it is great. Sarah Langan as an author is not one to run from the genres that many outsiders consider a ghetto. This novel is horror, it is Science Fiction. Because it has the strength and respect of literary circles doesn’t mean it is not science fiction. It is science fiction. Great science fiction indeed.
...more
Good Neighbors was a novel I pretty much never stopped thinking about. With a Monsters are Due on Maple Street (Classic Twilight Zone episode) meets Cli-fi - Langan created a lane for herself to dominate. Science fiction studies professor Liza Yaszek called her book about women writing SF Galactic Suburbia, one reason for that label is pioneer writers like Judith Merril for example were writing stories about families and rich characters the men were writing about. Langan is dominating the SF suburbia right now. I live in a city, and I am not doing the suburbs so I can’t comment on how accurate or inaccurate the commentary is but Sarah Langan is becoming SF’s critic of the burbs in general.
A Better World has a little Stepford Wives feeling because it is centered on a “perfect” community set in a future already radically changed by climate change. Linda is our POV character, and she is excited when her family is given a chance to move to Plymouth Valley a corporate town in late 21st-century America. The outside world is mostly a mystery and according to the subtle world-building that comes early in the novel. “It was the era of the Great Unwinding. The institutions, laws, and even the bridges and roads that people had come to depend on were falling apart. Everything got automated, but broken automated.” Langan gives us a nugget of the collapse, but little of the day-to-day life. On this early page, we get the same method of talking about The climate crisis. “The weather stopped making sense. Fires and storms raged. Blackouts rolled through the country like waves at a King's Stadium Dodger game. A lot of people stopped making sense, too. They were angry and mad and sad all the time, they were indignant all over overall they'd lost.”
Langan gives us plenty of world-building once we get to the corporate town, and it only adds to the mystery that we get hints about how unpleasant the rest of the world is. This is done mostly in characters expressing how lucky they are to live in Plymouth Valley.
“OK, it's bad period because you want a company job, and you want to live in a town like Plymouth Valley. Is that what I'm hearing?”
Josie looked at her with exasperation. “I don't want it! I have to. There's nothing outside. No place to go except a company.”
It effectively accomplishes the horror novel narrative trick of explaining why the characters would stay. Given that there is also a pagan wicker man-ish feel to the community in PV. It also reminded me of the Olvia Wilde-directed movie Don’t Worry Darling, but unlike that movie, A Better World works both before and after the reveal. This novel works better because it feels more naturally weird, and is so much better told.
Linda and her daughter Josie while happy to be there start to see through it quickly. but much of the story drive is built around how the family TRIES to fit in. There are hilarious moments like when Linda brings another family donuts and is lectured that she should’ve brought Sourdough. “When you visit, you're supposed to bring homemade sourdough. Something that takes effort. No one brings this sweet crap…”
That is probably the way all families approach the suburb, Hip the son in the family is fitting in, but Josie the daughter is struggling. Some of the most heartfelt moments are times when Linda’s heart aches for the struggles of her kids. Josie’s struggles on the soccer field highlight this.
A Better World will be marketed as a thriller, a satire, or social commentary. It is all those things and that is one of the reasons it is great. Sarah Langan as an author is not one to run from the genres that many outsiders consider a ghetto. This novel is horror, it is Science Fiction. Because it has the strength and respect of literary circles doesn’t mean it is not science fiction. It is science fiction. Great science fiction indeed.
...more
Notes are private!
0
1
Aug 16, 2024
Aug 26, 2024
Aug 16, 2024
Hardcover
B0BNPGF6CR
3.54
591
Feb 13, 2024
Feb 13, 2024
it was amazing
Famously Richard Matheson was watching Dracula and had the thought if one of these vampires is scary what if it was reversed? Thus, one of the greates
Famously Richard Matheson was watching Dracula and had the thought if one of these vampires is scary what if it was reversed? Thus, one of the greatest horror novels of all time was born. I Am Legend is not alone; many great works of fiction come from watching/reading something and thinking I have an idea to make this better. Or I would love to make something similar. I have a suspicion that Lebbon created Among The Living while thinking about what he would do with a sequel to Carpenter’s The Thing. Something he threw out into during the panel episode of my 1930 SF series with Brian Keene and Mary Sangiovani covering John W. Cambell’s Who Goes There.
While Peter Watts and Sam J. Miller got away with short stories that played with being sequels to The Thing. It is a whole different beast writing and marketing a novel. This novel is very much an example of a novel that can be sold to fans of the Carpenter classic looking for something similar. Vibe and tone of a paranoid SF thriller with an additional action component. Most compelling to me is the not-so-subtle ecological messaging that has been the hallmark of Lebbon’s last few novels.
I have made plenty of jokes about the title being the same as an Anthrax album, Lebbon also has a collection that shares All Nightmare Long with Tallica. The Thrax song of course was inspired by The Stephen King classic but we are going deeper than titles here. Just some trivia for those paying attention to such things.
ATL also reminds me in a great way of Lebbon’s writing partner Christopher Golden’s recent horror epic Road of Bones and the two books make a great double feature. They would be great books to take on a trip together. Both novels have far-north settings, crazy twists, an action-forward plot, and a sense of desperation that drips off the books.
Lebbon has been on a streak of Cli-fi novels although it is a long-standing issue of environmentalism going back to his earliest paperbacks. As a paperback original I want to put this out there this should be a contender for the PKD award.
Much like Lebbon’s favorite movie ALIENS, this novel is built on a foundation of a large cast of characters. The likability of these characters is all over the place, but they are all interesting. Lebbon throws us into the setting quickly and into the action, so some of the backstory comes in careful flashbacks. It is all done with a subtle touch that deepens without slowing the action. One of the magic tricks that Lebbon pulls off is making a propulsive adventure book set in nature at times feel claustrophobic. If you dare to put yourself into the character's shoes even out on this remote island you’ll feel walls closing in.
The novel balances the characters with such ease that I don’t feel that it has a main character or singular point of view. This is important because the push and pull between the different characters in this extreme situation is what builds the tension. It is the most THING about it. The paranoid reaction to who is infected, and who is not. Can we trust anyone? Why ? I will come back to that.
A team of environmental researchers are looking for evidence of the effects of climate change. Their research brings them to Hawkshead, an arctic island that is in a thaw thanks to global climate change. They go into a cave open for the first time in thousands of years. Inside they find cave paintings, and defrosting diseased bodies from long ago. Tempering the amazing discovery is the fear of ancient diseases. The vibe Lebbon builds is top-notch.
“When he reached the first chamber he let go of the rope and turned to look around. His head torch forced back the darkness, shadows hunkering down in cracks and corners. He stuck out his tongue, sniffed the air. He tasted damp and smelled age. He heard trickling of water nearby and echoing from further away. He’d been in places like this many times before but something was different about this cave, something off.”
Weirdness turns to creep factor when one of the team insists that one of the bodies moved. Trick of the eye or something else.
Adding to the character dynamic and the tension are the corporate explorers on this remote arctic island looking for mining potential. The different agendas have made the two teams rivals. This adds to the drama when the disease goes rampant. Dean and Bethan, now on revival teams, used to work together and she sees Dean as a corporate sell-out. I could see how some readers might now feel that the characters are given development, but I loved how this was done. Lebbon wasted no time, the flashbacks were kept to a minimum and they were all important to the story. Twenty-five years ago when it was believed that readers wanted longer epic novels a hundred pages would have been wasted on back story and bogged down the terror elements. The pace was great with just the perfect amount of humanity to make me care.
One of the most impressive scenes of writing is when Lebbon cuts many narrative carrots with one knife. Almost a hundred pages in Bethan remembers a conversation they all had about the things they most feared. This chapter provides depth for the characters while also providing world-building. Goyo one of the tough guys working for the mining operation won’t accept boring answers about deepest fears and brings up disease.
“What scares me most is the idea of a disease emerging from the deep past and coming to kill us all.” He goes on to tell the story of a disease on another island that seemed alive and seemed to want to spread.
The disease that the team named Deadeye almost feels born from Goyo’s fears. However, anything anyone in the novel thinks about is just theory. Smartly Lebbon doesn't put a misplaced expert on the team. The disease is a mystery and remains so. As a reader, I believed it was alien in origin, but to the team all they know is the thing seems intelligent and wants to spread. As we learn more about Wren when he is infected it controls you wanting to spread. Several chapters follow the tough guy character Wren as the infection takes over.
It is a new spin on Climate change, and another horror to be mined. Part of me feels I have already told you too much, but I also feel this novel is hard to spoil. The execution, and how tightly wound up the novel is makes for a simple but very effective work of Science Fiction horror.
As accomplished as Tim Lebbon is this book doesn’t have anything award bait about it. It might not make a Hugo or a Stoker ballot. I think it is as high quality as those works It should be considered for a Splatterpunk award. This will be in my top reads of the year, but it is such a book novel for me I wonder if others will be as jazzed as I am. I mean if you trust my opinions then read it.
...more
While Peter Watts and Sam J. Miller got away with short stories that played with being sequels to The Thing. It is a whole different beast writing and marketing a novel. This novel is very much an example of a novel that can be sold to fans of the Carpenter classic looking for something similar. Vibe and tone of a paranoid SF thriller with an additional action component. Most compelling to me is the not-so-subtle ecological messaging that has been the hallmark of Lebbon’s last few novels.
I have made plenty of jokes about the title being the same as an Anthrax album, Lebbon also has a collection that shares All Nightmare Long with Tallica. The Thrax song of course was inspired by The Stephen King classic but we are going deeper than titles here. Just some trivia for those paying attention to such things.
ATL also reminds me in a great way of Lebbon’s writing partner Christopher Golden’s recent horror epic Road of Bones and the two books make a great double feature. They would be great books to take on a trip together. Both novels have far-north settings, crazy twists, an action-forward plot, and a sense of desperation that drips off the books.
Lebbon has been on a streak of Cli-fi novels although it is a long-standing issue of environmentalism going back to his earliest paperbacks. As a paperback original I want to put this out there this should be a contender for the PKD award.
Much like Lebbon’s favorite movie ALIENS, this novel is built on a foundation of a large cast of characters. The likability of these characters is all over the place, but they are all interesting. Lebbon throws us into the setting quickly and into the action, so some of the backstory comes in careful flashbacks. It is all done with a subtle touch that deepens without slowing the action. One of the magic tricks that Lebbon pulls off is making a propulsive adventure book set in nature at times feel claustrophobic. If you dare to put yourself into the character's shoes even out on this remote island you’ll feel walls closing in.
The novel balances the characters with such ease that I don’t feel that it has a main character or singular point of view. This is important because the push and pull between the different characters in this extreme situation is what builds the tension. It is the most THING about it. The paranoid reaction to who is infected, and who is not. Can we trust anyone? Why ? I will come back to that.
A team of environmental researchers are looking for evidence of the effects of climate change. Their research brings them to Hawkshead, an arctic island that is in a thaw thanks to global climate change. They go into a cave open for the first time in thousands of years. Inside they find cave paintings, and defrosting diseased bodies from long ago. Tempering the amazing discovery is the fear of ancient diseases. The vibe Lebbon builds is top-notch.
“When he reached the first chamber he let go of the rope and turned to look around. His head torch forced back the darkness, shadows hunkering down in cracks and corners. He stuck out his tongue, sniffed the air. He tasted damp and smelled age. He heard trickling of water nearby and echoing from further away. He’d been in places like this many times before but something was different about this cave, something off.”
Weirdness turns to creep factor when one of the team insists that one of the bodies moved. Trick of the eye or something else.
Adding to the character dynamic and the tension are the corporate explorers on this remote arctic island looking for mining potential. The different agendas have made the two teams rivals. This adds to the drama when the disease goes rampant. Dean and Bethan, now on revival teams, used to work together and she sees Dean as a corporate sell-out. I could see how some readers might now feel that the characters are given development, but I loved how this was done. Lebbon wasted no time, the flashbacks were kept to a minimum and they were all important to the story. Twenty-five years ago when it was believed that readers wanted longer epic novels a hundred pages would have been wasted on back story and bogged down the terror elements. The pace was great with just the perfect amount of humanity to make me care.
One of the most impressive scenes of writing is when Lebbon cuts many narrative carrots with one knife. Almost a hundred pages in Bethan remembers a conversation they all had about the things they most feared. This chapter provides depth for the characters while also providing world-building. Goyo one of the tough guys working for the mining operation won’t accept boring answers about deepest fears and brings up disease.
“What scares me most is the idea of a disease emerging from the deep past and coming to kill us all.” He goes on to tell the story of a disease on another island that seemed alive and seemed to want to spread.
The disease that the team named Deadeye almost feels born from Goyo’s fears. However, anything anyone in the novel thinks about is just theory. Smartly Lebbon doesn't put a misplaced expert on the team. The disease is a mystery and remains so. As a reader, I believed it was alien in origin, but to the team all they know is the thing seems intelligent and wants to spread. As we learn more about Wren when he is infected it controls you wanting to spread. Several chapters follow the tough guy character Wren as the infection takes over.
It is a new spin on Climate change, and another horror to be mined. Part of me feels I have already told you too much, but I also feel this novel is hard to spoil. The execution, and how tightly wound up the novel is makes for a simple but very effective work of Science Fiction horror.
As accomplished as Tim Lebbon is this book doesn’t have anything award bait about it. It might not make a Hugo or a Stoker ballot. I think it is as high quality as those works It should be considered for a Splatterpunk award. This will be in my top reads of the year, but it is such a book novel for me I wonder if others will be as jazzed as I am. I mean if you trust my opinions then read it.
...more
Notes are private!
1
Apr 30, 2024
May 07, 2024
Apr 30, 2024
Kindle Edition
2.94
35
1967
1967
liked it
Dolphins of Altair
Margaret St. Clair was born (Eva Margaret Neely) in 1911. She is one of the trailblazers whose work I discovered through Lisa Yazsek Dolphins of Altair
Margaret St. Clair was born (Eva Margaret Neely) in 1911. She is one of the trailblazers whose work I discovered through Lisa Yazsek’s groundbreaking anthology The Future is Female. I can’t say I remember her story from that book, but I remembered her name. I saw it on the spine of this think paperback on the shelf at Verbatim Books here in San Diego. Her father was just elected to Congress shortly before she was born. The charmed DC childhood only till 1919. When her father died of Influenza she and her moved to the Midwest and eventually Los Angeles. She met her future husband Eric St.Clair.
While earning her master’s degree in Greek classics from Cal-Berkeley in the early 30s. They settled in a small bay area town, raised Dachshunds, and ran a plant nursery.
She started writing pulp fiction in the post-war era starting with a noir Detective story before turning the major focus of her output to Science Fiction publishing more than 70 stories that decade alone. Her Short story Mrs. Hawk was turned into an episode of Thriller (hosted by Boris Karloff) you can watch on YouTube, Rod Serling turned two of her stories into a Night Gallery episode. In 1966 she and her husband became Wiccan.
I checked out the Thriller episode, it is a weird and comedic episode about a figure from Greek mythology who has a pig farm where she is abducting men and turning them into pigs. The acting in the episode is hilarious and over the top. Still how cool that it was based on one of her stories.
So Dolphins of Altair sounds like the kinda of ecological science fiction I dig whether it is the brutal and realistic nightmares of John Brunner or Kim Stanley Robinson or the weirder takes of Ray Nayler I like when genre tackles our relationship with nature. In the case of Nayler his last two books I loved because they ask what does it mean to be an earthling. This novel is like a 60s pulpy version of that message.
So yeah compared to the message being made in a modern context it's pretty corny. That however is the fun of reading classic Science Fiction.
“Before the dawn of man . . .
. . . there was a covenant between the land and the sea people - a covenant long forgotten by those who stayed on shore but indelibly etched in the minds of others - the dolphins of Altair.
Now the covenant had been broken. Dolphins were being wantonly sacrificed in the name of scientific research, their waters increasingly polluted, and their number dangerously diminished. They had to find allies and strike back. Allies willing to sever their own earthly bonds for the sake of their sea brothers - willing, if necessary, to execute the destruction of the whole human race . ..”
Considered by many to be the first of a "psychedelic" era for her writing there are moments where I felt lost. The human characters are riding Dolphins and communicating with them in the form of a telepathic connection. There were times when I was lost if they were underwater and using telepathy or talking. I was lost for chunks of the book. When I found the narrative threads there were interesting moments to connect to. This book has all kinds of weird elements that include telepathic dolphins, ecological sabotage, alien ancestry, military experiments, 60s counterculture, interplanetary exchanges, and major disaster vibes. It also is a very California book.
The first part of the novel involves human characters working with Dolphins to sabotage and free captive Dolphins to help them with their plan. You see the Dolphins believe the covenant between land and sea is broken enough that they can fight back. The Dolphins call the humans splits, it took me a time or two to realize they were referring to people with legs. Their plan for freeing the Dolphins includes causing an earthquake, it becomes clear they have control over nature in an intense way.
One of the most interesting ideas is expressed when Dolphins explain to their human friends what the covenant means to them. It is expressed in a poem, one that has been passed down through generations telepathically from one generation of Dolphins to another. It is here that they suggest this poem is older than life on Earth…Yeah I mean where this is going is right in the title of the book.
When we are introduced to the radical Dolphin's plan to save the sea people you could imagine this happened because…
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It would take the heat off the sea people and their human allies – If the polar ice caps were to melt.”
Cue the piano to express deep shock. This ends and chapter and want to quote how the next chapter starts.
“I think we would laugh at him, except that, after all, he had already engineered an earthquake.”
The final act of the book is where it comes together as a disaster piece and at that point, the novel is fully in my favorite sub-genre the weird end-of-the-world novel. The Dolphins of Altair is funky very 60s Science Fiction novel, while the cover says it is a brilliant triumph I would not go that far. It is strange enough, and thought-provoking enough to get a light thumbs up from me. I was too confused at times to go with a masterpiece, compared to our modern genre the characters and prose are thin, but I prefer that, so that was not the problem.
I think many genre writers don’t trust their readers, maybe St.Clair trusted her readers a bit too much. I want to read her other novels so take that as a sign that she was up to plenty of good stuff.
...more
Margaret St. Clair was born (Eva Margaret Neely) in 1911. She is one of the trailblazers whose work I discovered through Lisa Yazsek Dolphins of Altair
Margaret St. Clair was born (Eva Margaret Neely) in 1911. She is one of the trailblazers whose work I discovered through Lisa Yazsek’s groundbreaking anthology The Future is Female. I can’t say I remember her story from that book, but I remembered her name. I saw it on the spine of this think paperback on the shelf at Verbatim Books here in San Diego. Her father was just elected to Congress shortly before she was born. The charmed DC childhood only till 1919. When her father died of Influenza she and her moved to the Midwest and eventually Los Angeles. She met her future husband Eric St.Clair.
While earning her master’s degree in Greek classics from Cal-Berkeley in the early 30s. They settled in a small bay area town, raised Dachshunds, and ran a plant nursery.
She started writing pulp fiction in the post-war era starting with a noir Detective story before turning the major focus of her output to Science Fiction publishing more than 70 stories that decade alone. Her Short story Mrs. Hawk was turned into an episode of Thriller (hosted by Boris Karloff) you can watch on YouTube, Rod Serling turned two of her stories into a Night Gallery episode. In 1966 she and her husband became Wiccan.
I checked out the Thriller episode, it is a weird and comedic episode about a figure from Greek mythology who has a pig farm where she is abducting men and turning them into pigs. The acting in the episode is hilarious and over the top. Still how cool that it was based on one of her stories.
So Dolphins of Altair sounds like the kinda of ecological science fiction I dig whether it is the brutal and realistic nightmares of John Brunner or Kim Stanley Robinson or the weirder takes of Ray Nayler I like when genre tackles our relationship with nature. In the case of Nayler his last two books I loved because they ask what does it mean to be an earthling. This novel is like a 60s pulpy version of that message.
So yeah compared to the message being made in a modern context it's pretty corny. That however is the fun of reading classic Science Fiction.
“Before the dawn of man . . .
. . . there was a covenant between the land and the sea people - a covenant long forgotten by those who stayed on shore but indelibly etched in the minds of others - the dolphins of Altair.
Now the covenant had been broken. Dolphins were being wantonly sacrificed in the name of scientific research, their waters increasingly polluted, and their number dangerously diminished. They had to find allies and strike back. Allies willing to sever their own earthly bonds for the sake of their sea brothers - willing, if necessary, to execute the destruction of the whole human race . ..”
Considered by many to be the first of a "psychedelic" era for her writing there are moments where I felt lost. The human characters are riding Dolphins and communicating with them in the form of a telepathic connection. There were times when I was lost if they were underwater and using telepathy or talking. I was lost for chunks of the book. When I found the narrative threads there were interesting moments to connect to. This book has all kinds of weird elements that include telepathic dolphins, ecological sabotage, alien ancestry, military experiments, 60s counterculture, interplanetary exchanges, and major disaster vibes. It also is a very California book.
The first part of the novel involves human characters working with Dolphins to sabotage and free captive Dolphins to help them with their plan. You see the Dolphins believe the covenant between land and sea is broken enough that they can fight back. The Dolphins call the humans splits, it took me a time or two to realize they were referring to people with legs. Their plan for freeing the Dolphins includes causing an earthquake, it becomes clear they have control over nature in an intense way.
One of the most interesting ideas is expressed when Dolphins explain to their human friends what the covenant means to them. It is expressed in a poem, one that has been passed down through generations telepathically from one generation of Dolphins to another. It is here that they suggest this poem is older than life on Earth…Yeah I mean where this is going is right in the title of the book.
When we are introduced to the radical Dolphin's plan to save the sea people you could imagine this happened because…
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It would take the heat off the sea people and their human allies – If the polar ice caps were to melt.”
Cue the piano to express deep shock. This ends and chapter and want to quote how the next chapter starts.
“I think we would laugh at him, except that, after all, he had already engineered an earthquake.”
The final act of the book is where it comes together as a disaster piece and at that point, the novel is fully in my favorite sub-genre the weird end-of-the-world novel. The Dolphins of Altair is funky very 60s Science Fiction novel, while the cover says it is a brilliant triumph I would not go that far. It is strange enough, and thought-provoking enough to get a light thumbs up from me. I was too confused at times to go with a masterpiece, compared to our modern genre the characters and prose are thin, but I prefer that, so that was not the problem.
I think many genre writers don’t trust their readers, maybe St.Clair trusted her readers a bit too much. I want to read her other novels so take that as a sign that she was up to plenty of good stuff.
...more
Notes are private!
1
Mar 03, 2024
Mar 05, 2024
Mar 03, 2024
Paperback
1250860504
9781250860507
1250860504
3.64
6,753
Mar 07, 2023
Mar 07, 2023
really liked it
Sometimes the concept of a novel is so good you marvel at the fact that it wasn't done before. The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Ann Older is
Sometimes the concept of a novel is so good you marvel at the fact that it wasn't done before. The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Ann Older is The first of a novel series of novels meant to invoke a cozy gaslamp mystery feeling. In the Holmes and Watson tradition, our detectives are two characters Mossa & Pleiti who have survived the ecological devastated earth to live in tightly packed platforms high in the atmosphere of a gas giant we assume is Jupiter but referred to through the book as Giant.
This is my second time reading Older and I really enjoyed the blend of social justice activism and near-future world-building of Infomocracy. That novel had more in common with political thrillers than the weird works of the Cyberpunks although the comparisons were out there. Think the Ryan Gosling movie Ides of March meets Leguin. It is part political and part spy thriller. So yeah I am still four years later suggesting Infomocracy.
This novel which was born out of the isolation of the pandemic, is a great high concept that is not exactly for me. I am not a cozy gaslamp mystery reader but I highly respect the idea and execution. Someone who is Holmes-head (I don't know what they are actually called) would probably find lots of easter eggs and stylistic touches that are sailing over my head.
The mystery is cozy in the sense that the unexplained suicide of a character who didn't seem like he wanted to die is low-stakes. It is not the fate of the universe. There are details that set a Holmes-like mystery with facts that twist and turn the story.
The novel is written in first person from Mossa's point of view. I am rarely a fan of novels told in first person but the story was told well enough that I forgot about it. Unlike Ascension by Nicholas Binge it CONSTANTLY reminded me.
The thing that worked for me was the world-building that expressed the details of an ecological crisis and Earth's post-mortem. Page 31 of this book is an info dump but it does an amazing job of answering the many questions the first thirty pages gave me. I liked the way you are through into the world and that was just the right amount of pages to leave the reader wondering.
"There had after all, been many species on earth, once.
Even the small subset of that number whose genetic information had been collected before they were driven out of existence, and a smaller faction of those who had been resurrected for the Mauzooluem, still resulted in an extremely large panoply of species."
The setting provides a set of stakes and pressures that counterbalance the so-called "cozy" nature of the mystery. The world-building is so well done, subtle at times, intense at others but always handled with skill. As a real-life Animal rights person I noticed a shout out to my peeps in this future.
"There were of course Animal rights activists who argued that the animals shouldn't have been reconstituted to live in what is essentially captivity."
Mossa points out that few have taken up this view because that is what humans are dealing with. What is interesting to me about this is what this means for this mystery series. All the mystery cases will be a result of the characters essentially existing in captivity.
Mossa as a character has Holmes's careful considerable intelligence when he calls the academic Pleiti we get the idea that their partnership is more than the mystery. As curious as I was about them I admit I was also interested in the street preacher who only appears on page 46. I am probably the only reader who felt that way but I wanted to know his deal.
Mossa calls back to the street preacher in chapter 17 and that was the first time in a while I really thought about the first-person narrative. Really cool high-concept science fiction and an excellent translation of the concept. ...more
This is my second time reading Older and I really enjoyed the blend of social justice activism and near-future world-building of Infomocracy. That novel had more in common with political thrillers than the weird works of the Cyberpunks although the comparisons were out there. Think the Ryan Gosling movie Ides of March meets Leguin. It is part political and part spy thriller. So yeah I am still four years later suggesting Infomocracy.
This novel which was born out of the isolation of the pandemic, is a great high concept that is not exactly for me. I am not a cozy gaslamp mystery reader but I highly respect the idea and execution. Someone who is Holmes-head (I don't know what they are actually called) would probably find lots of easter eggs and stylistic touches that are sailing over my head.
The mystery is cozy in the sense that the unexplained suicide of a character who didn't seem like he wanted to die is low-stakes. It is not the fate of the universe. There are details that set a Holmes-like mystery with facts that twist and turn the story.
The novel is written in first person from Mossa's point of view. I am rarely a fan of novels told in first person but the story was told well enough that I forgot about it. Unlike Ascension by Nicholas Binge it CONSTANTLY reminded me.
The thing that worked for me was the world-building that expressed the details of an ecological crisis and Earth's post-mortem. Page 31 of this book is an info dump but it does an amazing job of answering the many questions the first thirty pages gave me. I liked the way you are through into the world and that was just the right amount of pages to leave the reader wondering.
"There had after all, been many species on earth, once.
Even the small subset of that number whose genetic information had been collected before they were driven out of existence, and a smaller faction of those who had been resurrected for the Mauzooluem, still resulted in an extremely large panoply of species."
The setting provides a set of stakes and pressures that counterbalance the so-called "cozy" nature of the mystery. The world-building is so well done, subtle at times, intense at others but always handled with skill. As a real-life Animal rights person I noticed a shout out to my peeps in this future.
"There were of course Animal rights activists who argued that the animals shouldn't have been reconstituted to live in what is essentially captivity."
Mossa points out that few have taken up this view because that is what humans are dealing with. What is interesting to me about this is what this means for this mystery series. All the mystery cases will be a result of the characters essentially existing in captivity.
Mossa as a character has Holmes's careful considerable intelligence when he calls the academic Pleiti we get the idea that their partnership is more than the mystery. As curious as I was about them I admit I was also interested in the street preacher who only appears on page 46. I am probably the only reader who felt that way but I wanted to know his deal.
Mossa calls back to the street preacher in chapter 17 and that was the first time in a while I really thought about the first-person narrative. Really cool high-concept science fiction and an excellent translation of the concept. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Nov 05, 2023
Nov 07, 2023
Nov 05, 2023
Hardcover
1250875331
9781250875334
1250875331
3.70
8,304
Jul 18, 2023
Jul 18, 2023
liked it
Let me make it clear, that I root for every book, every book I open, I want it to rule, and I want to enjoy the experience every time. Science Fiction
Let me make it clear, that I root for every book, every book I open, I want it to rule, and I want to enjoy the experience every time. Science Fiction most of all. I don't remember where or how I heard of this novel. At some point, I put a hold on it at the library and was just hanging out on my hold shelf at the library. I honestly don't remember why I put it on hold.
I started reading it cold, reading nothing of the plot, but I did see this was the author's debut novel. This is a technically well-written novel and I enjoyed reading it for the most part. It was such a straightforward 21st-century science fiction novel it felt kinda like eating a plain bagel. I like my science fiction weird, with some jagged edges and that is not this.
To me, this felt like a super safe, down the middle mostly "hard" Science fiction. the story of Auska a half-Japanese woman who is chosen to represent Japan on a dangerous mission. The Phoenix is a generation ship sent out into the void to make sure the human race survives the coming ecological crisis. Trained from their young adult years a crew of all women who travel to the new worlds and mother to a new generation on the new world are traveling out.
The novel's events start with an explosion and Auska or point of view character barely survives. This starts the narrative that cuts back and forth with details about the training. It had to be this way since the first half being set up for the mission could have worked; it was better to have the action of the mission drive the narrative.
Auska and Ruth's story also benefits from how information is released slowly and carefully. The order of everything is carefully designed to keep the reader assuming that we will get answers to the mystery of who bombed the ship.
One of the problems I had with this novel is there was little new that I felt the novel brought to the table. The concept of the DAR (which I think stands for some form of augmented reality) was interesting, in that it made every corner of the ship like the holodeck, to keep the astronauts from feeling trapped in the tin can of the ship.
“Sometimes Auska admitted, but only after Gabriela was gone. She reached two fingers to her temple and triggered her DAR. She should be floating in the sky above Earth, arms outstretched surrounded by birds, but wherever she looked, puce-colored clouds pressed in. She couldn’t see a thing.”
The DAR was used in the story, it was Auska's malfunction in the system that led to key revelations, but I really thought we would go weirder places with it. I kept waiting for the AI or the antagonist to use this tech to manipulate reality.
For me, one of my favorite aspects was the relationship between Auska and her radical environmentalist mother. I could have used more of that part of the story. I am sure that is just a me thing. That is part of the problem the novel lacks a true antagonist. That could be seen as refreshing, but I saw it as a missed opportunity.
“She thought how there was nothing pure about love after all. How it had to get muddy with misunderstanding. People like her mother, like Ruth, they would always be other stars, visible but impossibly far away, and she would have to settle for imagining she knew what they were like inside.”
I don’t want to sound like I am being too hard on this author and this book. I was entertained. And there were things I liked about the experience. *Spoilers ahead* The biggest problem I had with it is something I am not sure would affect most Sci-fi readers. Too safe not enough jagged edges. The idea that a radical made it on the Phoenix was far more interesting than the story solution we got. This novel seemed to run away from dramatic tension. Auska and Ruth come together in a greater understanding. I felt lots of dramatic potential was left on the table. The fact that the great distance of interstellar space kept Auska and her mother from coming to terms with each other was great drama again I thought it was best to leave it unsolved.
Yume Kitasei is a talented writer and I will check out her work in the future. The Deep Sky had enough going for it, that I am excited to see where she goes from here.
...more
I started reading it cold, reading nothing of the plot, but I did see this was the author's debut novel. This is a technically well-written novel and I enjoyed reading it for the most part. It was such a straightforward 21st-century science fiction novel it felt kinda like eating a plain bagel. I like my science fiction weird, with some jagged edges and that is not this.
To me, this felt like a super safe, down the middle mostly "hard" Science fiction. the story of Auska a half-Japanese woman who is chosen to represent Japan on a dangerous mission. The Phoenix is a generation ship sent out into the void to make sure the human race survives the coming ecological crisis. Trained from their young adult years a crew of all women who travel to the new worlds and mother to a new generation on the new world are traveling out.
The novel's events start with an explosion and Auska or point of view character barely survives. This starts the narrative that cuts back and forth with details about the training. It had to be this way since the first half being set up for the mission could have worked; it was better to have the action of the mission drive the narrative.
Auska and Ruth's story also benefits from how information is released slowly and carefully. The order of everything is carefully designed to keep the reader assuming that we will get answers to the mystery of who bombed the ship.
One of the problems I had with this novel is there was little new that I felt the novel brought to the table. The concept of the DAR (which I think stands for some form of augmented reality) was interesting, in that it made every corner of the ship like the holodeck, to keep the astronauts from feeling trapped in the tin can of the ship.
“Sometimes Auska admitted, but only after Gabriela was gone. She reached two fingers to her temple and triggered her DAR. She should be floating in the sky above Earth, arms outstretched surrounded by birds, but wherever she looked, puce-colored clouds pressed in. She couldn’t see a thing.”
The DAR was used in the story, it was Auska's malfunction in the system that led to key revelations, but I really thought we would go weirder places with it. I kept waiting for the AI or the antagonist to use this tech to manipulate reality.
For me, one of my favorite aspects was the relationship between Auska and her radical environmentalist mother. I could have used more of that part of the story. I am sure that is just a me thing. That is part of the problem the novel lacks a true antagonist. That could be seen as refreshing, but I saw it as a missed opportunity.
“She thought how there was nothing pure about love after all. How it had to get muddy with misunderstanding. People like her mother, like Ruth, they would always be other stars, visible but impossibly far away, and she would have to settle for imagining she knew what they were like inside.”
I don’t want to sound like I am being too hard on this author and this book. I was entertained. And there were things I liked about the experience. *Spoilers ahead* The biggest problem I had with it is something I am not sure would affect most Sci-fi readers. Too safe not enough jagged edges. The idea that a radical made it on the Phoenix was far more interesting than the story solution we got. This novel seemed to run away from dramatic tension. Auska and Ruth come together in a greater understanding. I felt lots of dramatic potential was left on the table. The fact that the great distance of interstellar space kept Auska and her mother from coming to terms with each other was great drama again I thought it was best to leave it unsolved.
Yume Kitasei is a talented writer and I will check out her work in the future. The Deep Sky had enough going for it, that I am excited to see where she goes from here.
...more
Notes are private!
1
Nov 26, 2023
Dec 03, 2023
Oct 29, 2023
Hardcover
1982123095
9781982123093
1982123095
4.22
4,264
Jan 10, 2023
Jan 10, 2023
really liked it
“From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity
“From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.”
From the bestselling author of a literary novel comes a Science Fiction epic that despite being about the near future and approaching climate change apocalypse will never be called genre fiction even though it absolutely is.
Clocking in just under 900 pages and being so heavy I regretted taking it with me on a train trip to LA and back is the science fiction epic The Deluge. It is probably not the fault of the author Stephen Markley that his novel is a modern Stand on Zanzibar, I would guess he never heard of the John Brunner classic. The comparison is not an insult, I consider SOZ to be the best SF novel of the 20th century. It won the Hugo Award, and I will be comparing those books throughout this review.
Brunner embraced Science Fiction, and Markley appears to be wandering through the genre like he accidentally walked into the wrong store. That might be the fault of marketing and I apologize to Markley if I am wrong.
What he was in control of was the page count. I enjoyed this book but the weight and length did challenge me. As a writer, I try to limit narrative side quests or fluff. I don’t like to waste words. As a reader, I am more forgiving. That said Robert McCammon’s Swan Song was almost as long as this book and the page count didn’t bother me.
There is a tight 500 or 600-page version of this novel I would have thought perfect. That is still epic, but when a book is this long, this heavy that it takes almost two weeks for a fast reader like me you start to edit in your head or question entire chapters. I would think to myself, what does that have to do with the story? Many times they are details that while important can be seeded with asides, not entire chapters. Who the fuck am I? Markley is a more acclaimed author than me but I am giving my experience as a reader.
That is tons of negative thoughts about a book that I generally liked and think is important. Using multiple characters in the same epic is a method that classic door stops like The Stand and Swan Song have used. This novel has a diverse set of characters that show the collapse of global sustainability and the next couple of decades of efforts to deal with it. Cli-fi in our rapidly heating, flooding and growingly unsustainable future is the most important direction storytelling in any media is going. I might sound harsh on The Degluge but that is because it is so very important. If that sounds preachy then so be it, because apparently asking nice has universally failed to do shit to stop all this stuff. That is the point of this novel that weaves political, personal American panorama on this future.
Heat waves, rising waters, and massive storms. Some get offended if you call this an end-of-the-world novel, and that is not exactly true. That is some optimism on behalf of the author that I am not sure I share. However one of the best things Markley is doing here is painting a realistic picture of the frustration and resistance of the desperate to survive hitting the brick wall of the political system that kicks the can down the road on climate change. This is not something the book takes time to get to page 139…
“…we have a precious handful of years left to act, I promise you this: If you join this movement now, you will wake up fifteen, twenty years from now and feel sick that you didn’t do everything you could during the sliver of time when we still had a chance. When we hadn’t yet fallen over the brink.”
One of the reasons Stand on Zanzibar was considered such a breakthrough in style was because Brunner used a style he admitted he stole from the 1930 USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. Using letters, newspaper articles, and multiple seemingly unconnected characters and storylines. The Deluge uses this method to a degree. In one of the few page-saving methods, much of the world-building is done in Newspaper headlines that are mixed together like a collage. He still uses articles and multiple characters. Most of it is excellently written, Markley does a wonder job filling his diverse characters with an identity that makes them stand out from chapter to chapter.
I almost quit reading after the second chapter used this “experimental style” that was the only part of the writing that didn’t work for me. That chapter used boxes that had asides that sometimes added to the chapter with context, but sometimes they didn’t. I found them confusing, I often didn’t know what I was supposed to be reading or the order. It was frustrating.
If that had gone on longer I might have quit. I would have missed out.
It is interesting reading many of the comments, and online reviews very few point or even name characters who they spent hundreds of pages following. In a sense, the characters almost were more defined by what they were in this tapestry than who they were. The narratives used different styles, tenses, etc. so it was easy sometimes to think less about a character's name and think my self as the character not as Seth, but this is a chapter about the gay activist characters, Or this is ex-military drug addict, the guy whose name I don't remember now a week after reading the book. That is not a knock, I actually think that is a feature as part of the point seemed to be their roles in the crisis.
Each of the characters has their own personal connection to the growing crisis. The one that stood out to me was Seth and Ash deciding on having a baby. As a gay couple, the choice of having a child and raising them is powerful to get to witness in fiction but the rapidly ending world it is one I can relate to. At least one of my past relationships ended when I went with team Seth saying it was crazy to bring a baby into this world. “Forrest was born into socioecological circumstances more dire than I could have imagined. He was born into 444ppm carbon in the atmosphere, melting ice-caps, oceans crawling up the world’s coasts and deltas, soil salinization, dwindling fresh water, spreading desertification, and stalling agricultural production.”
I know this might offend some of you who are on team Ash, but I am glad I am not a young person today. That is the power of Speculative fiction. It is also the power to make this future not come true but as this part of the story powerfully displays - time is running out.
The heat waves, and the storms are well written and slowly and carefully lay out the mission statement. I am not positive but I think that statement is a rude awakening, get your shit together. Personally, I think Kim Stanley Robinson nailed the horrors of heatwaves better in his novel Ministry for the Future. John Shirley got the power of the unending storms better in his criminally underrated Stormland. The genre writers have been writing about an angry and warming planet for decades so perhaps we need Stephen Markley for the NPR listener who won't slum in the genre ghetto.
Some other issues this book dealt with well...
“Here in a campus bubble it was easy to look around and believe the country was swept up in a wave of change and possibility, a narrative propagated and commodified by the social media companies inflicting a new colonialism on people’s minds.”
I often tell co-workers that we are in a California bubble, where Trump doesn't seem so bad. That bubble here in San Diego also keeps the problems of climate change in the distance. The Deluge does an amazing job of portraying some of the political bubbles, and ways that the obvious need for change gets lost in the mundane even when people know better.
“You might not believe in what we’re doing, but this is the kind of action on which history pivots. This is a choice between revolution against the power structures or our extermination by those structures. People like you and your family? You’re what they harvest. Everything you do, everything you buy, everything you believe in—that’s just product and profit for them. You’re their cash crop.”
This moment stood out to me because it lays out the pivot point we are at so well. I like a cli-fi novel that reminds people that you are making choices. I have heard this novel preachy, but that is far as it goes. It doesn't say ride a bike or you will kill your grandkids, although sometimes I wish it did. It doesn't say you must go vegan, change law and act better now. It could be preachier, soI think that suggestion is without merit.
“The trajectories of the two major political parties shaped much of our lobbying experience, the Republicans in wounded disarray, trying to rebuild their party while frequently staving off primary challenges from suburban neo-Nazis, the Democrats playing a perpetual game of three-card monte, releasing aspirational platforms and progressive wish lists while mostly doing the bidding of Wall Street, Big Tech, and the military–national security–industrial complex.”
Is this preaching? Or is this explaining the hardcore reality of why we are a culture held underwater by the powerful and elite? I don't care how it comes off I just want more books like it.
The Deluge is a fantastic book, an important message but again I can't help but feel John Brunner made an equally powerful statement in 1969. His novel also addressed global issues better and was less focused on this one country. Together the two books half a century apart make an interesting comparison. SOZ was worried about overpopulation, and The Delgue is about a warming climate. Some dismiss Brunner prophetic nature because the population bomb didn't lead to a crash. But it is leading to a warming and unlivable future. One that Markley is warning readers about.
Environmental warning novels have a long tradition as long as the Nuclear war warning novel. The jury is out on this novel's ability to prevent this future but I can say it is adding to the discussion. I think this has more pros than cons, if a long book scares you I suggest Ministry For the Future, which reads more like a textbook but offers solutions. I have also included a link to my shelf of Cli-fi books.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
...more
From the bestselling author of a literary novel comes a Science Fiction epic that despite being about the near future and approaching climate change apocalypse will never be called genre fiction even though it absolutely is.
Clocking in just under 900 pages and being so heavy I regretted taking it with me on a train trip to LA and back is the science fiction epic The Deluge. It is probably not the fault of the author Stephen Markley that his novel is a modern Stand on Zanzibar, I would guess he never heard of the John Brunner classic. The comparison is not an insult, I consider SOZ to be the best SF novel of the 20th century. It won the Hugo Award, and I will be comparing those books throughout this review.
Brunner embraced Science Fiction, and Markley appears to be wandering through the genre like he accidentally walked into the wrong store. That might be the fault of marketing and I apologize to Markley if I am wrong.
What he was in control of was the page count. I enjoyed this book but the weight and length did challenge me. As a writer, I try to limit narrative side quests or fluff. I don’t like to waste words. As a reader, I am more forgiving. That said Robert McCammon’s Swan Song was almost as long as this book and the page count didn’t bother me.
There is a tight 500 or 600-page version of this novel I would have thought perfect. That is still epic, but when a book is this long, this heavy that it takes almost two weeks for a fast reader like me you start to edit in your head or question entire chapters. I would think to myself, what does that have to do with the story? Many times they are details that while important can be seeded with asides, not entire chapters. Who the fuck am I? Markley is a more acclaimed author than me but I am giving my experience as a reader.
That is tons of negative thoughts about a book that I generally liked and think is important. Using multiple characters in the same epic is a method that classic door stops like The Stand and Swan Song have used. This novel has a diverse set of characters that show the collapse of global sustainability and the next couple of decades of efforts to deal with it. Cli-fi in our rapidly heating, flooding and growingly unsustainable future is the most important direction storytelling in any media is going. I might sound harsh on The Degluge but that is because it is so very important. If that sounds preachy then so be it, because apparently asking nice has universally failed to do shit to stop all this stuff. That is the point of this novel that weaves political, personal American panorama on this future.
Heat waves, rising waters, and massive storms. Some get offended if you call this an end-of-the-world novel, and that is not exactly true. That is some optimism on behalf of the author that I am not sure I share. However one of the best things Markley is doing here is painting a realistic picture of the frustration and resistance of the desperate to survive hitting the brick wall of the political system that kicks the can down the road on climate change. This is not something the book takes time to get to page 139…
“…we have a precious handful of years left to act, I promise you this: If you join this movement now, you will wake up fifteen, twenty years from now and feel sick that you didn’t do everything you could during the sliver of time when we still had a chance. When we hadn’t yet fallen over the brink.”
One of the reasons Stand on Zanzibar was considered such a breakthrough in style was because Brunner used a style he admitted he stole from the 1930 USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. Using letters, newspaper articles, and multiple seemingly unconnected characters and storylines. The Deluge uses this method to a degree. In one of the few page-saving methods, much of the world-building is done in Newspaper headlines that are mixed together like a collage. He still uses articles and multiple characters. Most of it is excellently written, Markley does a wonder job filling his diverse characters with an identity that makes them stand out from chapter to chapter.
I almost quit reading after the second chapter used this “experimental style” that was the only part of the writing that didn’t work for me. That chapter used boxes that had asides that sometimes added to the chapter with context, but sometimes they didn’t. I found them confusing, I often didn’t know what I was supposed to be reading or the order. It was frustrating.
If that had gone on longer I might have quit. I would have missed out.
It is interesting reading many of the comments, and online reviews very few point or even name characters who they spent hundreds of pages following. In a sense, the characters almost were more defined by what they were in this tapestry than who they were. The narratives used different styles, tenses, etc. so it was easy sometimes to think less about a character's name and think my self as the character not as Seth, but this is a chapter about the gay activist characters, Or this is ex-military drug addict, the guy whose name I don't remember now a week after reading the book. That is not a knock, I actually think that is a feature as part of the point seemed to be their roles in the crisis.
Each of the characters has their own personal connection to the growing crisis. The one that stood out to me was Seth and Ash deciding on having a baby. As a gay couple, the choice of having a child and raising them is powerful to get to witness in fiction but the rapidly ending world it is one I can relate to. At least one of my past relationships ended when I went with team Seth saying it was crazy to bring a baby into this world. “Forrest was born into socioecological circumstances more dire than I could have imagined. He was born into 444ppm carbon in the atmosphere, melting ice-caps, oceans crawling up the world’s coasts and deltas, soil salinization, dwindling fresh water, spreading desertification, and stalling agricultural production.”
I know this might offend some of you who are on team Ash, but I am glad I am not a young person today. That is the power of Speculative fiction. It is also the power to make this future not come true but as this part of the story powerfully displays - time is running out.
The heat waves, and the storms are well written and slowly and carefully lay out the mission statement. I am not positive but I think that statement is a rude awakening, get your shit together. Personally, I think Kim Stanley Robinson nailed the horrors of heatwaves better in his novel Ministry for the Future. John Shirley got the power of the unending storms better in his criminally underrated Stormland. The genre writers have been writing about an angry and warming planet for decades so perhaps we need Stephen Markley for the NPR listener who won't slum in the genre ghetto.
Some other issues this book dealt with well...
“Here in a campus bubble it was easy to look around and believe the country was swept up in a wave of change and possibility, a narrative propagated and commodified by the social media companies inflicting a new colonialism on people’s minds.”
I often tell co-workers that we are in a California bubble, where Trump doesn't seem so bad. That bubble here in San Diego also keeps the problems of climate change in the distance. The Deluge does an amazing job of portraying some of the political bubbles, and ways that the obvious need for change gets lost in the mundane even when people know better.
“You might not believe in what we’re doing, but this is the kind of action on which history pivots. This is a choice between revolution against the power structures or our extermination by those structures. People like you and your family? You’re what they harvest. Everything you do, everything you buy, everything you believe in—that’s just product and profit for them. You’re their cash crop.”
This moment stood out to me because it lays out the pivot point we are at so well. I like a cli-fi novel that reminds people that you are making choices. I have heard this novel preachy, but that is far as it goes. It doesn't say ride a bike or you will kill your grandkids, although sometimes I wish it did. It doesn't say you must go vegan, change law and act better now. It could be preachier, soI think that suggestion is without merit.
“The trajectories of the two major political parties shaped much of our lobbying experience, the Republicans in wounded disarray, trying to rebuild their party while frequently staving off primary challenges from suburban neo-Nazis, the Democrats playing a perpetual game of three-card monte, releasing aspirational platforms and progressive wish lists while mostly doing the bidding of Wall Street, Big Tech, and the military–national security–industrial complex.”
Is this preaching? Or is this explaining the hardcore reality of why we are a culture held underwater by the powerful and elite? I don't care how it comes off I just want more books like it.
The Deluge is a fantastic book, an important message but again I can't help but feel John Brunner made an equally powerful statement in 1969. His novel also addressed global issues better and was less focused on this one country. Together the two books half a century apart make an interesting comparison. SOZ was worried about overpopulation, and The Delgue is about a warming climate. Some dismiss Brunner prophetic nature because the population bomb didn't lead to a crash. But it is leading to a warming and unlivable future. One that Markley is warning readers about.
Environmental warning novels have a long tradition as long as the Nuclear war warning novel. The jury is out on this novel's ability to prevent this future but I can say it is adding to the discussion. I think this has more pros than cons, if a long book scares you I suggest Ministry For the Future, which reads more like a textbook but offers solutions. I have also included a link to my shelf of Cli-fi books.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
...more
Notes are private!
1
Sep 15, 2023
Sep 25, 2023
Sep 15, 2023
Hardcover
0374605955
9780374605957
0374605955
3.93
23,312
Oct 04, 2022
Oct 04, 2022
it was amazing
I am prone to hyperbole when I like a thing, but in the case of this book, I figure I need to warn you that hyperbole is coming. Not only is it coming
I am prone to hyperbole when I like a thing, but in the case of this book, I figure I need to warn you that hyperbole is coming. Not only is it coming but it is serious and earned.
I admit I had not heard of Ray Nayler before all the buzz started on this book. I put it on hold at the library and forgot about it until it was sitting on the hold shelf. I went in not remembering why I was interested. Coming in cold made for an interesting read but I don't think this book can be ruined. But if it is enough that I call a book a masterpiece to sell you then by all means I will suggest you read it and come back because you will be thinking about it.
In the late 90s, there was a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. If you were not there this story will feel silly but let me tell you a little about it. The book is about a dude whose teacher is a talking Gorilla that patiently explains over the course of the book his philosophy. I am going to shorthand it, but this Gorilla Ishmael explains how the world works, outside of the anthropocentric mode we are all used to. The punk rock subculture I grew up in (the militant Vegan straight-edge scene of the 90s) was filled with environmental and animal rights activism. These causes are still central to who I am. In the 90s scene, Ishmael became the IT book.
Folks were getting tattoos, bands were recording concept albums, language was adopted from this book, and a whole radical subculture for a few years was treating this book (and the loose sequel The Story of B) like a religious text. Ishmael is not a good novel, but as a vessel of powerful thought-provoking ideas, it was awesome. I thought of it often when reading The Mountain in the Sea.
Ray Nayler has created an equally thought-provoking piece of science fiction but unlike Quinn’s book The Mountain in the Sea is a masterpiece of Science Fiction that is equally powerful as a narrative as it is a carrier of many powerful messages. My jaw dropped at the quality of this book often and in the ultimate sign of respect, I was jealous of Nayler’s ability to pull off this book. Like all the best works of modern fiction, only this one fucking person could write it. Nayler’s combination of SF fandom, knowledge of science, and intergovernmental experience created a literary unicorn. One unbelievable alchemy of thought and talent spit out this incredible masterpiece that shook me to my core.
The Mountain in the Sea was preaching to the choir with me, I already shared many of the views that came across, but it was a beautiful feeling to read it. A science fiction novel that had so much to say is not rare but one that doesn’t with skill, style, and heart in equal measure is a pretty special treat.
Set in the near future the story is told from many points of view but the primary one is Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen. She is brought in to investigate the incidents of violence that have been cropping up around the ocean of Octopuses that kill humans. Nguyen has spent her career trying to communicate with cephalopods and the Ocean in general. Much of the novel is set up by quotes from the book that it is implied that she wrote after these events called How Oceans Think. After the first chapter I thought this was a real book and was upset I could not add it to my Good reads “to be read” shelf.
There are a few other plots that Nayler weaves in the main one is an AI-driven automatic fishing vessel that is attacked by the Octopuses. There are a few human crew members and a couple of stowaways. This storyline and one involving automatic monks explore the possible consciousness of machines. This is the best exploration of those concepts I have read besides perhaps S.B. Divya’s Machinehood and Meru, very serious books, and the angry yet funny satire of Rudy Rucker’s Juicy Ghosts.
Again I am giving you a chance to bail without getting details, but it is massive environmental pressures force the Octopus to evolve. Dr.Nguyen is forced to confront these evolving octopuses who use symbols and sprays to communicate. Nayler lays out this communication through thrilling but patient scenes.
“The Octopus was standing, the tips of its arms the only things in contact with the floor of the chamber. As in the video before, it was in the full “Nosferatu pose – tall, its mantle vertical above its head, its arms, and web spread. The threat pose. And like before, the octopus, easily as tall as a human being was almost white.
Speak to me.”
The book design highlights these symbols that make up their attempts to explain to the human race. We are here and we are trying to communicate. This will invite positive Arrival comparisons. The comparisons to the Abyss are for ocean reasons but we are not talking to aliens, but desperate Earthlings trying to warn us. Stop killing us for we will start fighting back. There is a version of this story that is like an ocean strikes back Roland Emmerich-style action disaster movie. In that AI-generated story, Dr. Nguyen would have to translate the message in time to save her estranged child.
Thankfully Nayler is not interested in the action, he is interested in nudging your thoughts. This book is exciting because the story takes you to places that force you to think about our relationship to this massive part of the planet, we depend upon to live. The book is opinionated but not preachy and with the Orcas sabotaging boats and ships off the coast of Spain, it seems prophetic.
“We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.”
It is impossible to talk about the other themes of the novel as I see them without spoiling some elements. Dr.Nguyen has a friend who she communicates through the majority of the book. I just assumed this character was human. At a certain point, it was clear to me that the “Friend” was an AI. I think each reader will have a different moment when they realize that. I am sure there were clues but I didn’t figure that out until deep into the book.
Robotic monks, automatic fishing vessels, and a character who is the Elon Musk of AI, Nayler wrote this book long before AI became one of the dominant issues we as a culture were dealing with. Paul Trembly didn’t know when he wrote Survivor Song that his pandemic novel due to be released in 2020 was timely. Nayler’s novel about what it means to think, be aware and communicate is a Science fiction novel set in the future about now. A dying world (from a human sustainability standpoint) with our cultures trying to figure out how to handle machines designed to think. I mean WGA members striking to ensure AI don’t take their jobs had to skip the picket line today because the skyline looked like Blade Runner 2049.
“But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus.”
This is a novel about thought. The learning of the language of Octopus characters is at the heart of the discovery Nayler is asking you to go on. We have been taught this illusion that our humanity is a singular existence. It leads many to direct their lives toward consumption and happiness of oneself above all other motivations.
The life in the ocean doesn’t have motivations we recognize and if we started to be able to understand each other it would not make us feel great. Consider this quote from the book inside the book.
“Think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think”
This is nothing new for folks like me. 30 years of questioning the anthropocentric authority resulted in three decades of veganism and life with all kinds of harsh truths. Every day the millions and millions of living, breathing, and feeling animals that are used for their flesh hurts my soul. I have to live with the fact that I live in a sense behind enemy lines. Our culture is violent and self-destructive and it was nice that a character in this novel expressed feelings all to common for me.
“The man sipped his tea. “This feeling I have, of disgust and hatred, when I hear of what was done to the dogs— in some people, this feeling is multiplied a hundredfold. In some people, this feeling of disgust at what humans are doing to the world becomes everything for them. They cannot stop thinking of such things—of the terrible cruelties we continue to inflict on the animals unlucky enough to share this planet with us. They feel the need to intervene: to do something to stop the suffering. They have to act: their rage will not allow them any other course of action.”
Everyone who has read my reviews knows I think the key to storytelling is parallels and reversals, what this lacks in huge action it makes up with these fundamentals. They are all over this novel. Humans investigate what they think are monstrous actions of the Octopus but learn to communicate and thus…
“We’re monsters to the Octopuses: hunters, destroyers, killing their relatives and laying waste to their world. And they are monsters to us: their motivations inexplicable, their minds totally alien.”
The AI helps the human characters to understand the flaws their creators couldn’t engineer in them.
“We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us- we fear it won’t.”
When Stranger in a Strangeland came out it weirdly became a hippie sensation. Good thing most of those folks didn’t Grok Starship Troopers. Decades later anarchist bookstores in fiction and real life are named after elements of Leguin’s The Dispossessed. I am all for Science Fiction having this effect. In a better world, political leaders would be combating climate change and plastic land masses in the ocean with a copy of The Mountain in the Sea in their backpacks or on their shelves. It is like Ray Nayler has pointed a telescope at the ocean. A picture is worth a thousand words, but this collection of words is priceless. A masterpiece of Science Fiction worthy of all the awards. ...more
I admit I had not heard of Ray Nayler before all the buzz started on this book. I put it on hold at the library and forgot about it until it was sitting on the hold shelf. I went in not remembering why I was interested. Coming in cold made for an interesting read but I don't think this book can be ruined. But if it is enough that I call a book a masterpiece to sell you then by all means I will suggest you read it and come back because you will be thinking about it.
In the late 90s, there was a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. If you were not there this story will feel silly but let me tell you a little about it. The book is about a dude whose teacher is a talking Gorilla that patiently explains over the course of the book his philosophy. I am going to shorthand it, but this Gorilla Ishmael explains how the world works, outside of the anthropocentric mode we are all used to. The punk rock subculture I grew up in (the militant Vegan straight-edge scene of the 90s) was filled with environmental and animal rights activism. These causes are still central to who I am. In the 90s scene, Ishmael became the IT book.
Folks were getting tattoos, bands were recording concept albums, language was adopted from this book, and a whole radical subculture for a few years was treating this book (and the loose sequel The Story of B) like a religious text. Ishmael is not a good novel, but as a vessel of powerful thought-provoking ideas, it was awesome. I thought of it often when reading The Mountain in the Sea.
Ray Nayler has created an equally thought-provoking piece of science fiction but unlike Quinn’s book The Mountain in the Sea is a masterpiece of Science Fiction that is equally powerful as a narrative as it is a carrier of many powerful messages. My jaw dropped at the quality of this book often and in the ultimate sign of respect, I was jealous of Nayler’s ability to pull off this book. Like all the best works of modern fiction, only this one fucking person could write it. Nayler’s combination of SF fandom, knowledge of science, and intergovernmental experience created a literary unicorn. One unbelievable alchemy of thought and talent spit out this incredible masterpiece that shook me to my core.
The Mountain in the Sea was preaching to the choir with me, I already shared many of the views that came across, but it was a beautiful feeling to read it. A science fiction novel that had so much to say is not rare but one that doesn’t with skill, style, and heart in equal measure is a pretty special treat.
Set in the near future the story is told from many points of view but the primary one is Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen. She is brought in to investigate the incidents of violence that have been cropping up around the ocean of Octopuses that kill humans. Nguyen has spent her career trying to communicate with cephalopods and the Ocean in general. Much of the novel is set up by quotes from the book that it is implied that she wrote after these events called How Oceans Think. After the first chapter I thought this was a real book and was upset I could not add it to my Good reads “to be read” shelf.
There are a few other plots that Nayler weaves in the main one is an AI-driven automatic fishing vessel that is attacked by the Octopuses. There are a few human crew members and a couple of stowaways. This storyline and one involving automatic monks explore the possible consciousness of machines. This is the best exploration of those concepts I have read besides perhaps S.B. Divya’s Machinehood and Meru, very serious books, and the angry yet funny satire of Rudy Rucker’s Juicy Ghosts.
Again I am giving you a chance to bail without getting details, but it is massive environmental pressures force the Octopus to evolve. Dr.Nguyen is forced to confront these evolving octopuses who use symbols and sprays to communicate. Nayler lays out this communication through thrilling but patient scenes.
“The Octopus was standing, the tips of its arms the only things in contact with the floor of the chamber. As in the video before, it was in the full “Nosferatu pose – tall, its mantle vertical above its head, its arms, and web spread. The threat pose. And like before, the octopus, easily as tall as a human being was almost white.
Speak to me.”
The book design highlights these symbols that make up their attempts to explain to the human race. We are here and we are trying to communicate. This will invite positive Arrival comparisons. The comparisons to the Abyss are for ocean reasons but we are not talking to aliens, but desperate Earthlings trying to warn us. Stop killing us for we will start fighting back. There is a version of this story that is like an ocean strikes back Roland Emmerich-style action disaster movie. In that AI-generated story, Dr. Nguyen would have to translate the message in time to save her estranged child.
Thankfully Nayler is not interested in the action, he is interested in nudging your thoughts. This book is exciting because the story takes you to places that force you to think about our relationship to this massive part of the planet, we depend upon to live. The book is opinionated but not preachy and with the Orcas sabotaging boats and ships off the coast of Spain, it seems prophetic.
“We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.”
It is impossible to talk about the other themes of the novel as I see them without spoiling some elements. Dr.Nguyen has a friend who she communicates through the majority of the book. I just assumed this character was human. At a certain point, it was clear to me that the “Friend” was an AI. I think each reader will have a different moment when they realize that. I am sure there were clues but I didn’t figure that out until deep into the book.
Robotic monks, automatic fishing vessels, and a character who is the Elon Musk of AI, Nayler wrote this book long before AI became one of the dominant issues we as a culture were dealing with. Paul Trembly didn’t know when he wrote Survivor Song that his pandemic novel due to be released in 2020 was timely. Nayler’s novel about what it means to think, be aware and communicate is a Science fiction novel set in the future about now. A dying world (from a human sustainability standpoint) with our cultures trying to figure out how to handle machines designed to think. I mean WGA members striking to ensure AI don’t take their jobs had to skip the picket line today because the skyline looked like Blade Runner 2049.
“But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus.”
This is a novel about thought. The learning of the language of Octopus characters is at the heart of the discovery Nayler is asking you to go on. We have been taught this illusion that our humanity is a singular existence. It leads many to direct their lives toward consumption and happiness of oneself above all other motivations.
The life in the ocean doesn’t have motivations we recognize and if we started to be able to understand each other it would not make us feel great. Consider this quote from the book inside the book.
“Think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think”
This is nothing new for folks like me. 30 years of questioning the anthropocentric authority resulted in three decades of veganism and life with all kinds of harsh truths. Every day the millions and millions of living, breathing, and feeling animals that are used for their flesh hurts my soul. I have to live with the fact that I live in a sense behind enemy lines. Our culture is violent and self-destructive and it was nice that a character in this novel expressed feelings all to common for me.
“The man sipped his tea. “This feeling I have, of disgust and hatred, when I hear of what was done to the dogs— in some people, this feeling is multiplied a hundredfold. In some people, this feeling of disgust at what humans are doing to the world becomes everything for them. They cannot stop thinking of such things—of the terrible cruelties we continue to inflict on the animals unlucky enough to share this planet with us. They feel the need to intervene: to do something to stop the suffering. They have to act: their rage will not allow them any other course of action.”
Everyone who has read my reviews knows I think the key to storytelling is parallels and reversals, what this lacks in huge action it makes up with these fundamentals. They are all over this novel. Humans investigate what they think are monstrous actions of the Octopus but learn to communicate and thus…
“We’re monsters to the Octopuses: hunters, destroyers, killing their relatives and laying waste to their world. And they are monsters to us: their motivations inexplicable, their minds totally alien.”
The AI helps the human characters to understand the flaws their creators couldn’t engineer in them.
“We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us- we fear it won’t.”
When Stranger in a Strangeland came out it weirdly became a hippie sensation. Good thing most of those folks didn’t Grok Starship Troopers. Decades later anarchist bookstores in fiction and real life are named after elements of Leguin’s The Dispossessed. I am all for Science Fiction having this effect. In a better world, political leaders would be combating climate change and plastic land masses in the ocean with a copy of The Mountain in the Sea in their backpacks or on their shelves. It is like Ray Nayler has pointed a telescope at the ocean. A picture is worth a thousand words, but this collection of words is priceless. A masterpiece of Science Fiction worthy of all the awards. ...more
Notes are private!
1
May 20, 2023
May 27, 2023
May 20, 2023
Hardcover
1250161320
9781250161321
1250161320
3.47
649
Oct 17, 2016
Sep 12, 2017
it was amazing
In the many side effects of the Trump years one that really bothers me is softening of the anger toward GW Bush and his misadventures in the middle ea
In the many side effects of the Trump years one that really bothers me is softening of the anger toward GW Bush and his misadventures in the middle east. One sickening aspect of the Bush years was the terrible inexcusable lack of American empathy for the people and the suffering the American invasion caused in Iraq. It is hard enough to get people to watch the news, or read the history so perhaps there is a different war.
Enter this book of stories by authors from Iraq or the Iraqi diaspora. The idea is that the stories take place in 2103 - one hundred years after the invasion. Published by Tor I was excited as soon as I saw this not only because I wanted stories about this theme, but I also was hoping to discover Iraqi genre writers.
Sadly I don’t think there is an Iraqi SF scene, in the way I was envisioning. Some of these writers use surrealism, or the fantastic, but I don’t think there is an Iraqi scene per se. With each story, I would flip back to the author bios, all respected writers and filmmakers. A few seemed more than comfortable using genre tropes but mostly the 100 years plus prompt was excellent for kick starting these excellent writers imagination.
This is an above average collection of science fiction, not just because of the quality and yes all the stories are worth reading. In the text of the stories different cities are represented, different parts of Iraqi culture and all with an eye for the long range effects of war. There are a couple of the stories that I think are stand-outs and we should talk about them.
My favorite stories included. The Gardens of Babylon by Hassan Blasim, The Corporal by Ali Bader, Kuszib by Hassan Abdulrazzak, Najufa by Ibrahim Al-Marashi
Written by the editor of the collection wrote the Gardens of Babylon, a story with a slight Philip K. Dick vibes. A game designer is haunted by the past and after taking a hallucinogenic drug the past comes alive. The story has excellent vibes and weird tone that made it one of the coolest feelings. It also is the story with some of the best world-building. This moment spoke to me. “No one can deny the ingenuity of the giant domes. Each district is a circular space like a giant sports ground, roofed over with smart glass dome that absorbs the sunlight, which is the main source of energy in babylon. All the districts are linked by amazing underground trains.”
This is some of the best world building in the collection, the name Iraq is gone in this story, Babylon or Mesopotamia is what the people call the region which is included in Chinese holdings. Still under colonial rule, but one where the people are offered Chinese citizenship. This makes it a rare SF story that envisions a heavily Chinese influenced future much like the Maureen Hugh classic China Mountain Zhang.
All around excellent story.
The Corporal is a fantastic story about an Iraqi soldier who despite being very in favor of the Iraq war is accidently killed by a U.S. soldier. He convinces god to send him back 100 years later as a prophet. One problem: the roles of the two societies have been reversed. “I am not sure how it happened exactly but history has taken a big turn. Just take America: now it’s an extremist state, gripped by religion.”
It is hard not to think of this story (written in 2013) as correctly forseeing a bit of the culture wars in this country. It is easy to see the MAGA heads who want this Christian great American revival as they are dragged screaming into a progressive future.
The absolute banger of the collection without a doubt Kuszib by Hassan Abdulrazzak. It has really cool world-building “Ur parked the Paradigm Hover in the vehicle dock, and the couple took the magnet capsule to Alliance City Station (in a part of town that used to be called Revolution city in the old days). “
I hate to spoil this story but the way the story unfolds is very sly. You might be mistaken at first to believe this is a vampire story. This story is the most wild of Science fiction concepts and the most effective story in every way. The story is so well written and contains so laugh out loud characters and irreverent moments. This story has gross moments, funny moments and super cool moments of creative invention.
Iraq + 100 is far from a normal Science Fiction anthology. It is important, it is a must read for fans of socially important political Science Fiction.
...more
Notes are private!
1
Mar 22, 2023
Mar 25, 2023
Mar 22, 2023
Paperback
9798986152301
B09YN7MS6Q
4.50
10
unknown
Aug 02, 2022
really liked it
I have no idea how to say the title of this book and the spelling hurts my dyslexic brain just thinking of it. I going to resist just calling it Sweet
I have no idea how to say the title of this book and the spelling hurts my dyslexic brain just thinking of it. I going to resist just calling it Sweetland as I did in my head. This is a really interesting book and calling it Sweetland might make it sound like a generic Candyland rip-off but this book is far from that. It is a strange book that kinda fits into different genres here and there but there is no simple all-encompassing genre. It is dystopian, it is cyberpunk, and at times it is CLI-FI. It is science fiction but at times surreal and at other times more grounded. At the heart that grounding comes mostly from a father and daughter relationship that drives the main narrative forward.
Duane Poncy is a name I was familiar with knowing that he was a Portland writer but this is the first of his works that I really dove into. It is well written that does make the best SF does – using the future to talk about today. So for those who want a basic non-spoiler review before the serious breakdown begins…
Skyrmion is the kind of Science Fiction novel that the independent press is here for. While it might not be the most commercial of works it hit plenty of buttons for me. The sad state of publishing means that a doesn’t tick a few narrow boxes is of interest to mainstream publishers. Thanks to indies and the democratizing force of small presses and small publishing we are lucky to get books like this.
The world-building is top-notch, the main character Joe Larivee and his relationship with his daughter carried me deep into the narrative, and the concept was fascinating. I was interested through the whole book, even if I got a little bogged in the middle. The only drawback is I think a good 50-70 pages could have been trimmed, but I am mostly nitpicking. It is a four-star book to me, a really good example of the importance of small or independent presses.
I enjoyed this book, and now let’s get into it. I went into this book absolutely blind on the topic. I knew nothing of the story, plot, or anything of that nature. So, I was pleasantly surprised that it took place in Portland, a city I lived in for 7 years, and had just visited a few days before starting this book. I suppose I forgot Duane Poncy lived that. Regardless this is the first future Portland book I have read since Edward Morris's excellent first Blackguard book.
Poncy writes very effectively about Portland…
“It was one of her rituals, paying homage to her childhood memories of the city that once existed.
She recalled the vast urban forest that once populated Portland when everything greened in early spring, the dogwoods, and cherry blooming, Dad walking her to school along sidewalks covered in a magic carpet of pink and white petals;…”
Later on this page, the character explains the die-offs and changes around Portland. I started to see coming back to Portland after a few years was a trip. As beautiful as Portland still is I can see the fears, residents have for the path and how the world will handle the warming future. I saw fewer bikes and more cars. Portland is changing, as a microcosm for our climate crisis Skyrmion carefully and patiently paints a world of the future when most people have sacrificed reality for trans-reality and fake living.
One of the strengths of this novel is how it blends technology with the surreal and spiritual nature of the human species transcending the mess we made. Consider this paragraph that weaves these vibes.
“Some anomaly had struck him as he scrolled by. Someone had written stealth coding to spare certain nodes. Dark Matter hidden in Grid’s fabric an elusive Skyrion he wondered what hypothetical magnetic particle played in the scheme if any. It was likely nothing more than a code name.”
These are elements and vibes throughout this novel that really gave the book a special vibe. We have read stories of sim worlds or transports like Stargate. We have seen that before, but this novel will not remind you of those books. It has its own thing. The novel doesn’t beat you over the head with the misery of this future just gives you a lived-in feeling.
None of the setting or ideas would mean anything if we didn’t have anyone to care about. Jim and his daughter Jessie are the heart. As a career social worker, Jim is in an interesting place to interact with the narrative and drive the story. They live in a future where it is understandable that most want to crawl into sim-worlds as real life is miserable. The conflict comes for Jim when his daughter wants to emigrate not just to a sim, but to another world. Sweetland is thought to be just another sim at first but it is more. A totally alien world an unknown location where people are transferring their mind/soul to meet a copy of their bodies.
“Dad, do you know about Sweetland?”
She didn’t wait for him to answer. “I’m going to sweetland.”
“Baby, there is no Sweetland.”
“Yes, there is, Dad. I’m Going and I want you to go with me. There is no future left here.”
Jim is not sure that is a sim, a real planet or just a bullshit cult.
This is the question at the heart of the novel. Poncy does well to hook this Sweetland idea in the heart of this teenager. It feels very natural that a child living in a hopeless time would latch to this without fully understanding. As a reader, the mystery is answered just enough to set up another story.
“You mean it is not in Bolivia?”
“It’s another world, Ms. Deluna.”
“You mean like another planet. Like in another galaxy or something? Or do you mean a sim world? Because I don’t think I can survive in a sim world.”
“We haven’t figured out exactly where Sweetland is – not in relationship to earth. The scientists will tell you about quantum transference, and string theory, all of that, but nothing in Sweetland’s sky is familiar to us. The only way to convince you is to show you.”
In that sense, this book almost feels like an origin story or a prequel to an even grander adventure. I admit when I saw book one on the cover I was a bit skeptical. Doing that on a book adds so much weight to a narrative. I am not looking at these books as stories but as opening salvos. Now I am judging a book by the ability to draw me back. The main reason I want to come back is how very different a second would be. Promising four books is a little James Cameron Avatar to me, but that is not a bad thing for me. It is bold as hell. Poncy has my attention for book two.
PS on a side note for my Dickheads this part was super PKD and gave me a chuckle...
“The directory was huge, taking up much of the wall. Joe scanned the names of various offices. “Office of Crushed Dreams. Office of Delusions. Office of Rationalizations. Office of Mental Acrobatics.”
...more
Duane Poncy is a name I was familiar with knowing that he was a Portland writer but this is the first of his works that I really dove into. It is well written that does make the best SF does – using the future to talk about today. So for those who want a basic non-spoiler review before the serious breakdown begins…
Skyrmion is the kind of Science Fiction novel that the independent press is here for. While it might not be the most commercial of works it hit plenty of buttons for me. The sad state of publishing means that a doesn’t tick a few narrow boxes is of interest to mainstream publishers. Thanks to indies and the democratizing force of small presses and small publishing we are lucky to get books like this.
The world-building is top-notch, the main character Joe Larivee and his relationship with his daughter carried me deep into the narrative, and the concept was fascinating. I was interested through the whole book, even if I got a little bogged in the middle. The only drawback is I think a good 50-70 pages could have been trimmed, but I am mostly nitpicking. It is a four-star book to me, a really good example of the importance of small or independent presses.
I enjoyed this book, and now let’s get into it. I went into this book absolutely blind on the topic. I knew nothing of the story, plot, or anything of that nature. So, I was pleasantly surprised that it took place in Portland, a city I lived in for 7 years, and had just visited a few days before starting this book. I suppose I forgot Duane Poncy lived that. Regardless this is the first future Portland book I have read since Edward Morris's excellent first Blackguard book.
Poncy writes very effectively about Portland…
“It was one of her rituals, paying homage to her childhood memories of the city that once existed.
She recalled the vast urban forest that once populated Portland when everything greened in early spring, the dogwoods, and cherry blooming, Dad walking her to school along sidewalks covered in a magic carpet of pink and white petals;…”
Later on this page, the character explains the die-offs and changes around Portland. I started to see coming back to Portland after a few years was a trip. As beautiful as Portland still is I can see the fears, residents have for the path and how the world will handle the warming future. I saw fewer bikes and more cars. Portland is changing, as a microcosm for our climate crisis Skyrmion carefully and patiently paints a world of the future when most people have sacrificed reality for trans-reality and fake living.
One of the strengths of this novel is how it blends technology with the surreal and spiritual nature of the human species transcending the mess we made. Consider this paragraph that weaves these vibes.
“Some anomaly had struck him as he scrolled by. Someone had written stealth coding to spare certain nodes. Dark Matter hidden in Grid’s fabric an elusive Skyrion he wondered what hypothetical magnetic particle played in the scheme if any. It was likely nothing more than a code name.”
These are elements and vibes throughout this novel that really gave the book a special vibe. We have read stories of sim worlds or transports like Stargate. We have seen that before, but this novel will not remind you of those books. It has its own thing. The novel doesn’t beat you over the head with the misery of this future just gives you a lived-in feeling.
None of the setting or ideas would mean anything if we didn’t have anyone to care about. Jim and his daughter Jessie are the heart. As a career social worker, Jim is in an interesting place to interact with the narrative and drive the story. They live in a future where it is understandable that most want to crawl into sim-worlds as real life is miserable. The conflict comes for Jim when his daughter wants to emigrate not just to a sim, but to another world. Sweetland is thought to be just another sim at first but it is more. A totally alien world an unknown location where people are transferring their mind/soul to meet a copy of their bodies.
“Dad, do you know about Sweetland?”
She didn’t wait for him to answer. “I’m going to sweetland.”
“Baby, there is no Sweetland.”
“Yes, there is, Dad. I’m Going and I want you to go with me. There is no future left here.”
Jim is not sure that is a sim, a real planet or just a bullshit cult.
This is the question at the heart of the novel. Poncy does well to hook this Sweetland idea in the heart of this teenager. It feels very natural that a child living in a hopeless time would latch to this without fully understanding. As a reader, the mystery is answered just enough to set up another story.
“You mean it is not in Bolivia?”
“It’s another world, Ms. Deluna.”
“You mean like another planet. Like in another galaxy or something? Or do you mean a sim world? Because I don’t think I can survive in a sim world.”
“We haven’t figured out exactly where Sweetland is – not in relationship to earth. The scientists will tell you about quantum transference, and string theory, all of that, but nothing in Sweetland’s sky is familiar to us. The only way to convince you is to show you.”
In that sense, this book almost feels like an origin story or a prequel to an even grander adventure. I admit when I saw book one on the cover I was a bit skeptical. Doing that on a book adds so much weight to a narrative. I am not looking at these books as stories but as opening salvos. Now I am judging a book by the ability to draw me back. The main reason I want to come back is how very different a second would be. Promising four books is a little James Cameron Avatar to me, but that is not a bad thing for me. It is bold as hell. Poncy has my attention for book two.
PS on a side note for my Dickheads this part was super PKD and gave me a chuckle...
“The directory was huge, taking up much of the wall. Joe scanned the names of various offices. “Office of Crushed Dreams. Office of Delusions. Office of Rationalizations. Office of Mental Acrobatics.”
...more
Notes are private!
1
Jul 12, 2022
Jul 23, 2022
Jul 12, 2022
Kindle Edition
1250264936
9781250264930
1250264936
3.42
222
Mar 29, 2022
Mar 29, 2022
it was amazing
I got lots of love in my heart for some authors. Although we only hung out in the flesh once, Maurice Broaddus and I grew an hour's drive away from ea
I got lots of love in my heart for some authors. Although we only hung out in the flesh once, Maurice Broaddus and I grew an hour's drive away from each other. We grew up on the same TV horror host and the thing is he is an amazing and one of kind author I have read and reviewed over and over. When the deal was made for this trilogy, it was sold as an Afrofuturist take on The Expanse. These kinds of marketing comparisons are often reductive but, in this case, I think that is a fair take. I mean I was totally sold on that. It is not hard SF in the way The Expanse has wormholes, but Sweep also has time travel, and other light fantastical elements.
When writing about his short story collection I said this. “The Voices of Martyrs will largely be overlooked because short story collections rarely sell as much as novels. This finely-tuned collection is a must-read for anyone interested in high-quality dark literature. The most powerful collection I have read since Brian Evenson's A Collapse of Horses. Both are important reads however Voice of Martyrs goes beyond just being good, it is a book of deep meaning.”
I bring this up because if you want to know how good of a writer Broaddus is that is the best example. That being said this is the most fun I have had reading a MB book. That is saying something as he has a series that is “The Wire” -ish retelling of King Arthur and award-winning Steampunk novellas. My feeling is once the trilogy comes together the strength of the greater narrative will only increase. This book will lose some lazy readers, but hey I have been told by lots of people they couldn’t get into Dune. Those people are wrong but it is understandable I suppose as Dune is dense as gluten-free bread. As a fan of intense world-building, it works for me but sometimes it is unexplainable alchemy. There were times I was a little lost on who was where, and who was who but that doesn’t always turn me off. I am along for the ride until I figure it out.
Thankfully this book came with a handy list of families and a timeline in the opening and a glossary in the closing pages. I tried not to refer to these but I read the timeline at the open and checked in on it a couple of times. This novel is set against the backdrop of The Muungano Empire, an African Diaspora set after post ecological collapse of the earth spread through the solar system mostly on the Moon, Mars, and Titan. LISC represents O.E. (Old Earth) interests. There is a bit of a cold war stalemate until in 2120 the Orun Gate wormhole is discovered.
This opening to another star system is firmly in control of The Muungano Empire and that is the jumping-off for the novel that takes place in 2121. Before I go deep into the story where minor spoilers might exist let's say that this is a 5-star book to me and a recommendation. MB does a great job of World-building what feels to this outsider like a credible solar system spanning neo-African culture. Their dominance is a result of a time travel accident that gave the crew a chance with modern tech extra time to re-build in the past but they spent most of that time hiding on the moon creating “The Dreaming City” and positioning themselves to become a dominant power. Considering the colonial history Africa dealt with this new culture is trying something different
A Sweep of Stars mixes deep cultural mythology and African vibes with characters who keep it real. Characters who give their family members shit and curse like normal people. That really helped me relate to the characters. I made the mistake of reading some of the reviews and I couldn’t help but notice how many of the reviewers failed to comment on many of the social-political commentaries that is dripping off the pages of this book. There is some lip-service #ownvoices in some of the reviews folks need to slow down and look a little closer at what Sweep of Stars is laying down.
Sweep of Stars is Space Opera with an African feeling, it is an epic tale with lots of characters, narrative shifts, and twists and at the heart is a story that is entertaining for the events we witness as much as the radical ideas that get a subtle introduction. I found the novel well written, some readers had a hard time that certain chapters slipped into second person. I will be interviewing MB for the podcast soon so we will the exact reason. I suspected this was a way for the narrative to express the idea that you are a part of the future. Maybe I am overthinking it.
So yeah big thumbs up. That may sound highbrow and snooty but there are space marines, battles, aliens, pirates, rasta Jedis, and murder mystery as well. Let's get into details.
Of course, I dug that MB gave a shout-out to his hometown of Indianapolis which is apparently the capital of Old Earth. In this future. Shout out to my future Hoosiers.
“Several figures wearing light scattering masks designed to defeat facial-recognition algorithm stormed about. Some toted phase EMP carronades. The international district of Indianapolis was once the side of town that suffered from benign neglect of city officials. Property values plummeted, money enough to rebrand the area and immigrants moved in. And flourished. Through LISC, the city found money enough to rebrand the area the International District. This grew into the international marketplace, which soon housed several embassies once the nation’s capital shifted to the booming metropolis.”
There is a scene with the panting of the learning tree that seemed like an even more direct shout-out to real folks in the author’s life. Muungano culture is an interesting one, a somewhat Anarchist culture. The character of Xola who is murdered as head of a family is a goofball who loves telling stories and embarrassing his family. Sound like someone who has his picture on the dust jacket?
Muungano culture doesn’t fit neatly into western political boxes, collectivist and anarchist in many ways, but is structured on traditions deeply rooted in family legacy.
“All of Muungano’s Territory lit up as a hologram projection, from the Dreaming City to Mars to the mining outpost. No borders, per se, not the way O.E. might define them. Only communities of alliance. This was what they had all fought so hard to forge. They needed a new vocabulary to describe the experiment they embarked on. Empire wasn’t it. A budding cooperative cradled in a sweep of stars.”
This is one of the first elements I have seen ignored in almost all the reviews I have read. This may seem like simple world-building and MB does it subtle and right. These moments are not over-explained, they are naturally told in the midst of the story. You will of course notice the title of the book so it is not a stretch to think this passage is part of the mission statement of this story.
Leguin and Spinrad are some of the most well-known genre anarchists and I am not saying this book goes that far but it is clear MB is suggesting a divorce from western culture and standard capitalist monoculture. At the same time, this future while vastly different and divergent from our timeline is connected by characters like the Hellfighters soldiers who make a point not to forget the struggles the African diaspora had in our times.
This was highlighted in a fun exchange when a soldier who was called the keeper of the belt explained that he was wearing the belt of the Notorious B.I.G.
“It’s true. When you set your eyes on it again, you need to realize that you’re looking at a piece of hip-hop history. A holy relic.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
Their generation, not-quite-affectionately called neoniks, loved the late-twentieth-century era as part of what they called The Remember Revolution. They committed themselves to never forget the tragedies of O.E., from Black Wall Street to MOVE to First World. Admirable in philosophy, though in practice, they basically just adopted the era’s slang.”
I like how this scene begins amusing but ends with a powerful statement letting the reader know that the issues of racism and colonialism are not forgotten in this radically changed future. While the main focus of the story is the intrigue, the action, and the characters it was the ideas I found radically moving. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the story but asides like this spoke to me.
“We’ became slaves to wheat,” Stacia said.
“Yes. Wheat, the technology and systematic impact of agriculture, tricked us into serving it and spreading it around the world. Similarly, you don’t own the wormhole and you certainly don’t control it.”
I can’t really say at this point that this is a deeply intentionally radical book. It is however a science fiction novel of radical ideas. Some of the mainstream science fiction fandoms may have a problem with this but fuck a whole bunch of that. The novel speaks to this…
“…We stand in opposition to their entire way of life. We created ways of being and moving. Of valuing and celebrating one another. Allowing our systems – political and economic – to grow out of our humanity. Seeking only the best for one another and our community. That’s why we’re a threat. And will always be seen as one.”
Or…
“As you can imagine, all of this only fueled O.E.’s paranoia of us, stoking their fears that we plotted against them. They came to believe that it was only a matter of time before we unleashed the destructive force of our military might. Because history has told us that is what they would have done.”
Damn, I love Sweep of Stars. As a piece of space opera, it is fun, every bit as filled with intrigue and action as The Expanse. As a piece of World-building, it is every bit as thought out as Dune. As a work of thoughtful speculation, it is as mindful and literary as Hyperion As a work of radical science fiction, it is every bit as radical as The Dispossessed. Hyperbole, maybe but Sweep of Stars earned it with me. ...more
When writing about his short story collection I said this. “The Voices of Martyrs will largely be overlooked because short story collections rarely sell as much as novels. This finely-tuned collection is a must-read for anyone interested in high-quality dark literature. The most powerful collection I have read since Brian Evenson's A Collapse of Horses. Both are important reads however Voice of Martyrs goes beyond just being good, it is a book of deep meaning.”
I bring this up because if you want to know how good of a writer Broaddus is that is the best example. That being said this is the most fun I have had reading a MB book. That is saying something as he has a series that is “The Wire” -ish retelling of King Arthur and award-winning Steampunk novellas. My feeling is once the trilogy comes together the strength of the greater narrative will only increase. This book will lose some lazy readers, but hey I have been told by lots of people they couldn’t get into Dune. Those people are wrong but it is understandable I suppose as Dune is dense as gluten-free bread. As a fan of intense world-building, it works for me but sometimes it is unexplainable alchemy. There were times I was a little lost on who was where, and who was who but that doesn’t always turn me off. I am along for the ride until I figure it out.
Thankfully this book came with a handy list of families and a timeline in the opening and a glossary in the closing pages. I tried not to refer to these but I read the timeline at the open and checked in on it a couple of times. This novel is set against the backdrop of The Muungano Empire, an African Diaspora set after post ecological collapse of the earth spread through the solar system mostly on the Moon, Mars, and Titan. LISC represents O.E. (Old Earth) interests. There is a bit of a cold war stalemate until in 2120 the Orun Gate wormhole is discovered.
This opening to another star system is firmly in control of The Muungano Empire and that is the jumping-off for the novel that takes place in 2121. Before I go deep into the story where minor spoilers might exist let's say that this is a 5-star book to me and a recommendation. MB does a great job of World-building what feels to this outsider like a credible solar system spanning neo-African culture. Their dominance is a result of a time travel accident that gave the crew a chance with modern tech extra time to re-build in the past but they spent most of that time hiding on the moon creating “The Dreaming City” and positioning themselves to become a dominant power. Considering the colonial history Africa dealt with this new culture is trying something different
A Sweep of Stars mixes deep cultural mythology and African vibes with characters who keep it real. Characters who give their family members shit and curse like normal people. That really helped me relate to the characters. I made the mistake of reading some of the reviews and I couldn’t help but notice how many of the reviewers failed to comment on many of the social-political commentaries that is dripping off the pages of this book. There is some lip-service #ownvoices in some of the reviews folks need to slow down and look a little closer at what Sweep of Stars is laying down.
Sweep of Stars is Space Opera with an African feeling, it is an epic tale with lots of characters, narrative shifts, and twists and at the heart is a story that is entertaining for the events we witness as much as the radical ideas that get a subtle introduction. I found the novel well written, some readers had a hard time that certain chapters slipped into second person. I will be interviewing MB for the podcast soon so we will the exact reason. I suspected this was a way for the narrative to express the idea that you are a part of the future. Maybe I am overthinking it.
So yeah big thumbs up. That may sound highbrow and snooty but there are space marines, battles, aliens, pirates, rasta Jedis, and murder mystery as well. Let's get into details.
Of course, I dug that MB gave a shout-out to his hometown of Indianapolis which is apparently the capital of Old Earth. In this future. Shout out to my future Hoosiers.
“Several figures wearing light scattering masks designed to defeat facial-recognition algorithm stormed about. Some toted phase EMP carronades. The international district of Indianapolis was once the side of town that suffered from benign neglect of city officials. Property values plummeted, money enough to rebrand the area and immigrants moved in. And flourished. Through LISC, the city found money enough to rebrand the area the International District. This grew into the international marketplace, which soon housed several embassies once the nation’s capital shifted to the booming metropolis.”
There is a scene with the panting of the learning tree that seemed like an even more direct shout-out to real folks in the author’s life. Muungano culture is an interesting one, a somewhat Anarchist culture. The character of Xola who is murdered as head of a family is a goofball who loves telling stories and embarrassing his family. Sound like someone who has his picture on the dust jacket?
Muungano culture doesn’t fit neatly into western political boxes, collectivist and anarchist in many ways, but is structured on traditions deeply rooted in family legacy.
“All of Muungano’s Territory lit up as a hologram projection, from the Dreaming City to Mars to the mining outpost. No borders, per se, not the way O.E. might define them. Only communities of alliance. This was what they had all fought so hard to forge. They needed a new vocabulary to describe the experiment they embarked on. Empire wasn’t it. A budding cooperative cradled in a sweep of stars.”
This is one of the first elements I have seen ignored in almost all the reviews I have read. This may seem like simple world-building and MB does it subtle and right. These moments are not over-explained, they are naturally told in the midst of the story. You will of course notice the title of the book so it is not a stretch to think this passage is part of the mission statement of this story.
Leguin and Spinrad are some of the most well-known genre anarchists and I am not saying this book goes that far but it is clear MB is suggesting a divorce from western culture and standard capitalist monoculture. At the same time, this future while vastly different and divergent from our timeline is connected by characters like the Hellfighters soldiers who make a point not to forget the struggles the African diaspora had in our times.
This was highlighted in a fun exchange when a soldier who was called the keeper of the belt explained that he was wearing the belt of the Notorious B.I.G.
“It’s true. When you set your eyes on it again, you need to realize that you’re looking at a piece of hip-hop history. A holy relic.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
Their generation, not-quite-affectionately called neoniks, loved the late-twentieth-century era as part of what they called The Remember Revolution. They committed themselves to never forget the tragedies of O.E., from Black Wall Street to MOVE to First World. Admirable in philosophy, though in practice, they basically just adopted the era’s slang.”
I like how this scene begins amusing but ends with a powerful statement letting the reader know that the issues of racism and colonialism are not forgotten in this radically changed future. While the main focus of the story is the intrigue, the action, and the characters it was the ideas I found radically moving. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the story but asides like this spoke to me.
“We’ became slaves to wheat,” Stacia said.
“Yes. Wheat, the technology and systematic impact of agriculture, tricked us into serving it and spreading it around the world. Similarly, you don’t own the wormhole and you certainly don’t control it.”
I can’t really say at this point that this is a deeply intentionally radical book. It is however a science fiction novel of radical ideas. Some of the mainstream science fiction fandoms may have a problem with this but fuck a whole bunch of that. The novel speaks to this…
“…We stand in opposition to their entire way of life. We created ways of being and moving. Of valuing and celebrating one another. Allowing our systems – political and economic – to grow out of our humanity. Seeking only the best for one another and our community. That’s why we’re a threat. And will always be seen as one.”
Or…
“As you can imagine, all of this only fueled O.E.’s paranoia of us, stoking their fears that we plotted against them. They came to believe that it was only a matter of time before we unleashed the destructive force of our military might. Because history has told us that is what they would have done.”
Damn, I love Sweep of Stars. As a piece of space opera, it is fun, every bit as filled with intrigue and action as The Expanse. As a piece of World-building, it is every bit as thought out as Dune. As a work of thoughtful speculation, it is as mindful and literary as Hyperion As a work of radical science fiction, it is every bit as radical as The Dispossessed. Hyperbole, maybe but Sweep of Stars earned it with me. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Jun 25, 2022
Jul 06, 2022
Jun 25, 2022
Hardcover
1803360429
9781803360423
1803360429
3.57
443
Jul 05, 2022
Jul 19, 2022
it was amazing
Tim Lebbon is one of those writers for me that I trust. The dude knows what the hell he is doing telling a story, building worlds and characters. The
Tim Lebbon is one of those writers for me that I trust. The dude knows what the hell he is doing telling a story, building worlds and characters. The novel that won me over was The Silence that in 2015 was my favorite read of that year. While I was disappointed by A Quiet Place (when I saw the trailer I thought when did The Silence cast Emily Blunt?), the movie The Silence was a valiant attempt but for this fan of the novel, I just couldn’t go there. For real seven years after reading The Silence there are scenes that still haunt me. What did I say at the time…
“This novel is in the tradition of British dystopias ranging from Day of the Triffids to 28 Days Later. The Silence is a high-concept monster novel that creates terror in the reader by milking every drop of the idea. There is a moment 2/3 of the way through the narrative that was the most brutal scene I have experienced since the ending of the Mist. I knew this scene was coming, it was obvious and Lebbon gave the reader plenty of warnings. Despite all the warnings reading it still hit me like a gut punch.”
We are not here to talk about The Silence, as Tim Lebbon has a new novel called The Last Storm, but I wanted to highlight the moment I fell into the hands of this storyteller. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy as Tim is coming on the podcast, but my interest is high as a huge fan of Cli-fi, climate, and environmental horror. I mean I was nominated for the Splatterpunk award for best novel for my entry into the sub-genre with Ring of Fire. I am passionate about this sub-genre.
The sustainability of earth is my most gnawing personal fear, many of my favorite most disturbing reads include The 60s Ballard novels eco-horror novels, The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, or The Bridge by Skipp and Spector. Stuff like that. I had to read this one. Somehow his novel Eden escaped me, I will fix that. Thank you to Tim for sending me this one and coming on the pod. (Recording soon)
The Last Storm takes the climate horror in an exciting new direction. It seems like it could possibly be in the same universe as Eden but I am not sure about that. Lebbon has always been a writer who was good at using the family dynamic to build and maintain suspense. I get the feeling that environmental fears are becoming a theme for this horror writer and of course, I think it is natural.
One of my favorite reads last year was John Shirley’s underrated Cli-fi novel Stormland. It took very modern climate fears – unending hurricane seasons and combined what he does best by adding Cyberpunk elements. It is a great novel. Lebbon does a similar trick here, by writing about a brutal climate future and giving it a personal spin. The family dynamic and some cosmic horror beasties. This was a bit shocking for me as I went in only knowing “Climate horror- Tim Leboon” (I was sold right there)
I admit for some reason I was expecting a cold realistic post-apocalypse drama like The Road. My fault. Regardless this novel is a supernatural horror novel set against an American dust bowl that is our future if we don’t start making changes. The narrative follows multiple points of view, and the rhythm of how we go from character to character is perfect. My only real nitpick is using first person in multiple points of view book sometimes takes me out of a story reading me I am reading a book. For the most part, the story and writing are strong enough that I was lost in the story, but I don’t think this will affect most readers.
Jesse is the character I would consider our main point of view. As the story really starts with him. He is living alone in the desert. He inherited an ability that makes him a folk hero in this future. He has the power to make rain appear, and this power had me thinking we were getting something like the John Farris novel The Fury or King’s Firestarter meets McCarthy’s The Road, and I wasn’t that far off.
In this world the rainmakers have become almost mythical, reports on the internet and TV have made these people mythical. Jesse and his (ex)wife Karina scattered after one of the storms Jesse made caused destruction that included their lost daughter Ash who they believed dead. We also meet Jimi who is a soaker, who collects and sells water. He hates Jesse whose storm really messed with him. He has been seeking him for revenge. This all comes to head when Karina thinks she has seen Ash on a video and their daughter is alive and starting to make rain, this means as she grows stronger, she will eventually bring the monsters. The race is on to find Ash.
The dynamic that being a rainmaker sets up in this world is fascinating, because why wouldn’t they just bring the earth back? The problem is this magic is supernatural, the price is high. It is painful and dangerous, and in the end, it actually opens holes to other worlds filled with monsters. That is where the cosmic horror comes in. I love the idea of the slow dusty painful climate death that creeps by inches across a dying landscape versus the wet madness of the storm hiding a dread from another reality.
Lebbon has a reputation for writing horror, but he has written lots of science fiction, even if much of that is for media tie-in franchises. He does a wonderful job with the world-building. One thing I really liked is this rare case of a post-apocalypse, that still has parks, phones, TV, cars, and the internet.
“The park itself is marked by drought. Grass is dead. A large pond contains a mere puddle of muddy water, and a few scruffy ducks pad across its oily surface. Hardy trees persist here and there, but planting beds are home to cacti and a few swathes of invasive devil grass. Even in the city people are fighting against the painful truth of change. They don’t call it the climate crisis anymore, or global warming, or any other name that might have once have been used to urge positive action. Now, this was the norm.”
When I read a book, I dog-ear pages I want to talk about in my reviews, and in this case, most of the things I took note of were world-building, but so much of the horror of this world is the novel and a glimpse into our future. Lebbon gives us a supernatural thriller but the bones are built on the speculative horror of this future.
“The fire raged across the desert after starting in scrubland. There are a thousand ways for such a blaze to begin: sun shining through on to a scatter of dried plants; sparks from a passing vehicle; Sometimes it’s intentional. On a landscape fried dry by terrible drought and baked day after day by a merciless sun. Fire was a demon that stalked from place to place, searching for where to settle its blazing roots.”
I want to also point out that the prose is some of Lebbon’s best. Not flowery at all but perfectly calibrated for the story giving moments of dark beauty. Several chapters end with powerful moments that hit hard. “Eight in the morning, clear sky, already ninety degrees in the shade, the world was nothing like it had been yesterday.”
That weather report is an important detail. These powerful chapter-ending shots are throughout the novel. Perfectly timed cliffhangers and gut punches at the end of chapters keep you reading.
Before I write about spoilers let me just say that I loved this novel, and had fun reading it. Like many novels the more I thought about it. I enjoyed elements I missed in my first reading. So I recommend this book for fans of SF climate horror hybrids. Tim Lebbon fans will be there. I still think the silence is a better novel to start one, but both are great.
OK spoilers…
The Last Storm is a CLI-FI novel, it has effective world-building, but it also has rich characters, and as Lebbon does so well there is a strong family dynamic. Jessie and Ash are tragic figures who have such important talents but it ends up being a curse. This is a powerful story on many levels as a piece of science fiction it would be easy to focus on the dynamic of the rainmakers and the allegory they represent in the drought-stricken future. That is the heart of the story part of the story.
“The rain felt good,” Cee says. “Like…no rain I’ve ever felt before.”
“Fresh,” I say. “Pure.”
“Right, until it started raining blood.”
Besides being a fun Slayer reference, this is the price that rainmakers makers pay. It is the fear Ash’s family lives with. What do the creatures falling in the raining blood represent? “The fires are closing, a glimpse of hell in the rear-view mirror. The wipers smeared blood, and for the first time he wondered where it all came from, and the pain that must be suffered there to make so much.”
They represent but the ghosts of the world we have killed off. The price of returning the water to our world is the ghosts of the world humanity has killed off. The best kind of science fiction uses the future to reflect on how we live our lives today. The sad reality is it is harder and harder to write a novel about the future without grim, dark horror. This novel is a cross-genre classic. Science Fiction horror at its finest.
...more
“This novel is in the tradition of British dystopias ranging from Day of the Triffids to 28 Days Later. The Silence is a high-concept monster novel that creates terror in the reader by milking every drop of the idea. There is a moment 2/3 of the way through the narrative that was the most brutal scene I have experienced since the ending of the Mist. I knew this scene was coming, it was obvious and Lebbon gave the reader plenty of warnings. Despite all the warnings reading it still hit me like a gut punch.”
We are not here to talk about The Silence, as Tim Lebbon has a new novel called The Last Storm, but I wanted to highlight the moment I fell into the hands of this storyteller. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy as Tim is coming on the podcast, but my interest is high as a huge fan of Cli-fi, climate, and environmental horror. I mean I was nominated for the Splatterpunk award for best novel for my entry into the sub-genre with Ring of Fire. I am passionate about this sub-genre.
The sustainability of earth is my most gnawing personal fear, many of my favorite most disturbing reads include The 60s Ballard novels eco-horror novels, The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, or The Bridge by Skipp and Spector. Stuff like that. I had to read this one. Somehow his novel Eden escaped me, I will fix that. Thank you to Tim for sending me this one and coming on the pod. (Recording soon)
The Last Storm takes the climate horror in an exciting new direction. It seems like it could possibly be in the same universe as Eden but I am not sure about that. Lebbon has always been a writer who was good at using the family dynamic to build and maintain suspense. I get the feeling that environmental fears are becoming a theme for this horror writer and of course, I think it is natural.
One of my favorite reads last year was John Shirley’s underrated Cli-fi novel Stormland. It took very modern climate fears – unending hurricane seasons and combined what he does best by adding Cyberpunk elements. It is a great novel. Lebbon does a similar trick here, by writing about a brutal climate future and giving it a personal spin. The family dynamic and some cosmic horror beasties. This was a bit shocking for me as I went in only knowing “Climate horror- Tim Leboon” (I was sold right there)
I admit for some reason I was expecting a cold realistic post-apocalypse drama like The Road. My fault. Regardless this novel is a supernatural horror novel set against an American dust bowl that is our future if we don’t start making changes. The narrative follows multiple points of view, and the rhythm of how we go from character to character is perfect. My only real nitpick is using first person in multiple points of view book sometimes takes me out of a story reading me I am reading a book. For the most part, the story and writing are strong enough that I was lost in the story, but I don’t think this will affect most readers.
Jesse is the character I would consider our main point of view. As the story really starts with him. He is living alone in the desert. He inherited an ability that makes him a folk hero in this future. He has the power to make rain appear, and this power had me thinking we were getting something like the John Farris novel The Fury or King’s Firestarter meets McCarthy’s The Road, and I wasn’t that far off.
In this world the rainmakers have become almost mythical, reports on the internet and TV have made these people mythical. Jesse and his (ex)wife Karina scattered after one of the storms Jesse made caused destruction that included their lost daughter Ash who they believed dead. We also meet Jimi who is a soaker, who collects and sells water. He hates Jesse whose storm really messed with him. He has been seeking him for revenge. This all comes to head when Karina thinks she has seen Ash on a video and their daughter is alive and starting to make rain, this means as she grows stronger, she will eventually bring the monsters. The race is on to find Ash.
The dynamic that being a rainmaker sets up in this world is fascinating, because why wouldn’t they just bring the earth back? The problem is this magic is supernatural, the price is high. It is painful and dangerous, and in the end, it actually opens holes to other worlds filled with monsters. That is where the cosmic horror comes in. I love the idea of the slow dusty painful climate death that creeps by inches across a dying landscape versus the wet madness of the storm hiding a dread from another reality.
Lebbon has a reputation for writing horror, but he has written lots of science fiction, even if much of that is for media tie-in franchises. He does a wonderful job with the world-building. One thing I really liked is this rare case of a post-apocalypse, that still has parks, phones, TV, cars, and the internet.
“The park itself is marked by drought. Grass is dead. A large pond contains a mere puddle of muddy water, and a few scruffy ducks pad across its oily surface. Hardy trees persist here and there, but planting beds are home to cacti and a few swathes of invasive devil grass. Even in the city people are fighting against the painful truth of change. They don’t call it the climate crisis anymore, or global warming, or any other name that might have once have been used to urge positive action. Now, this was the norm.”
When I read a book, I dog-ear pages I want to talk about in my reviews, and in this case, most of the things I took note of were world-building, but so much of the horror of this world is the novel and a glimpse into our future. Lebbon gives us a supernatural thriller but the bones are built on the speculative horror of this future.
“The fire raged across the desert after starting in scrubland. There are a thousand ways for such a blaze to begin: sun shining through on to a scatter of dried plants; sparks from a passing vehicle; Sometimes it’s intentional. On a landscape fried dry by terrible drought and baked day after day by a merciless sun. Fire was a demon that stalked from place to place, searching for where to settle its blazing roots.”
I want to also point out that the prose is some of Lebbon’s best. Not flowery at all but perfectly calibrated for the story giving moments of dark beauty. Several chapters end with powerful moments that hit hard. “Eight in the morning, clear sky, already ninety degrees in the shade, the world was nothing like it had been yesterday.”
That weather report is an important detail. These powerful chapter-ending shots are throughout the novel. Perfectly timed cliffhangers and gut punches at the end of chapters keep you reading.
Before I write about spoilers let me just say that I loved this novel, and had fun reading it. Like many novels the more I thought about it. I enjoyed elements I missed in my first reading. So I recommend this book for fans of SF climate horror hybrids. Tim Lebbon fans will be there. I still think the silence is a better novel to start one, but both are great.
OK spoilers…
The Last Storm is a CLI-FI novel, it has effective world-building, but it also has rich characters, and as Lebbon does so well there is a strong family dynamic. Jessie and Ash are tragic figures who have such important talents but it ends up being a curse. This is a powerful story on many levels as a piece of science fiction it would be easy to focus on the dynamic of the rainmakers and the allegory they represent in the drought-stricken future. That is the heart of the story part of the story.
“The rain felt good,” Cee says. “Like…no rain I’ve ever felt before.”
“Fresh,” I say. “Pure.”
“Right, until it started raining blood.”
Besides being a fun Slayer reference, this is the price that rainmakers makers pay. It is the fear Ash’s family lives with. What do the creatures falling in the raining blood represent? “The fires are closing, a glimpse of hell in the rear-view mirror. The wipers smeared blood, and for the first time he wondered where it all came from, and the pain that must be suffered there to make so much.”
They represent but the ghosts of the world we have killed off. The price of returning the water to our world is the ghosts of the world humanity has killed off. The best kind of science fiction uses the future to reflect on how we live our lives today. The sad reality is it is harder and harder to write a novel about the future without grim, dark horror. This novel is a cross-genre classic. Science Fiction horror at its finest.
...more
Notes are private!
1
Jun 10, 2022
Jun 16, 2022
Jun 10, 2022
Paperback
0063072645
9780063072640
0063072645
3.83
60,178
Jan 18, 2022
Jan 18, 2022
it was amazing
I am on a super-hot streak of reading new novels. In some ways it is luck of the draw, I put books on hold at the library, they come in when they come
I am on a super-hot streak of reading new novels. In some ways it is luck of the draw, I put books on hold at the library, they come in when they come in. After reading the over-the-top insanity of Manhunt (which is both Sci-fi and horror, don’t get me started) the sober tone of this book was just as welcome, but in a totally different way. I don't remember where I heard about this book. I put it on hold months ago, and Sequoia Nagamatsu is not a name I had ever heard of before. I did however hear a glowing review on the SFF Yeah! podcast from Book Riot just a few days before I cracked it open.
From the moment I started reading this book I was immediately struck by the power of the prose, the strength of the narrative, and the powerful feeling I got when I read each and every story in this book. It is a novel sorta, I mean it could also be called a short story collection all set in the same universe, but collections do not sell - at least we are told that all the time. On a technical level, it wasn’t until something I consider a spoiler tied it all together in the last story that really made it feel more like a single work. Doesn’t matter it is fantastic no matter how you market it.
Sequoia Nagamatsu is a powerful and talented writer, the emotional and epic scope of these stories had me wondering where the hell these came from? The pandemic nature of it all had me wondering if this was written in response to COVID and if that sounds impossibly fast Remember that Anthem by Noah Hawley was written and already published in response to the January 6th insurrection. That is not the case with How High We Go in Dark is that Nagamatsu was working on these stories for more than a decade some of them written as stand-alone stories as far back as 2009.
The marketing of the book makes the cross-comparison between Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven. The format is clearly influenced by David Mitchell's style of narrative formatting, It wasn't just that novel as he used a similar structure, he also used it in at least The Bone Clocks. The Station Eleven comparison is mostly pandemic related, but also the tone of reaching for hope. Let's be clear before we reach for hope it gets really dark. I was not a fan of the title that I could never remember when people asked me what I was reading, but I understand what it means.
So before we talk spoilers for the story or themes let me say outright. How High We Go in the Dark is a fantastic piece of work. Might be the best thing I have read this year and considering the last couple of books have all been amazing that is saying something. Okay mild spoilers, but still you might want to read it come back…
“In Siberia, the thawing ground was a ceiling on the verge of collapse, sodden with ice melt and the mammoth detritus of prehistory. The kilometer-long Batagaika Crater had been widening with temperature rise like some god had unzipped the snow-topped marshlands, exposing woolly rhinos and other extinct beasts.”
The concept of climate change unleashing a virus is one I also explored in my CLI-FI novel, so I am familiar with this concept and really enjoyed its use here. It is not that far-fetched and considering the themes, we will get to at the end, it was really important to the inter-linked stories. This also shows something underrated about this novel. SN took the science pretty seriously and the novel shows this with the climate elements but also the stuff that takes place off earth.
So yeah this takes place in the future when climate change has unleashed disease upon the world with melting ice that releases bacteria that has not been around in thousands of years. This is happening by the way. So far it hasn’t been deadly, but it could. In this case when the novel starts we are years into a virus that targets the young. Children can’t fight it. Adults are mostly immune but fifteen and under are at risk. When the novel starts we get a view into the scientists studying the melting ice and the roots of the plague. The second chapter is where it gets a little darker.
“Everyone scoffed when the governor first announced plans for an amusement park that could gently end children’s pain—roller coasters capable of lulling their passengers into unconsciousness before stopping their hearts.”
The POV character is a comedian and at first, I thought this was going to be a little more surreal. It has a radically different tone than the first chapter, an emotional gut-punch, one after another…
“We love you, Danny,” He said “My little Dan the man.”
“We’ll be right here, watching,” she said “You’re such a good boy.”
I couldn’t imagine being in their place. I thought about the tiny body bags lining the streets in the early days of the plague, how crying parents could be heard all hours of the night, the white buses that took away the deceased to be stored or burned or studied.”
This chapter is painful, I am not a parent, but I imagine this seems impossibly dark, but when the chapter comes that shows humans working to escape earth you need this chapter to show how far they have fallen. How desperate the species is to get out of dodge.
This may be personal but there was only one story I didn’t like and found to be ineffective, kinda BS. As a 29-year (so far) vegan who has volunteered at for months at a time at Farm Sanctuaries, I have spent time around pigs. Sweet emotional and smart critters, I am an animal rights person. There is a chapter where a character wrestles with the ethics of exploiting animals for organs to save humans. This is done in a science fictional way when a character learns to communicate with a pig named Snortorious.
“Pig is food?
“Yes sometimes,” I say. “But some people keep pigs as pets and there are wild pigs like the ones you see on your nature shows.”
People eat pig.
Snortorious Snorts became frantic.”
In the end, Snortorious decides shortly after this that he will be harvested for organs that he wants to help people. I will never agree with this in my decades of being vegan I have seen people tie themselves into ethical pretzels to try and defend eating food made in a cruel and brutal way and a lot of you people love your bacon. It may not have been SN’s intention but to me, this chapter came off as an elaborate way to justify meat-eating. It didn’t ultimately hurt my view of the novel because as much as I didn’t like this chapter I liked the rest that much more.
Okay moving on. As a science fictionist and a space nerd I found the chapter set on the generation ship escaping earth just as heartbreaking as an amusement park for euthanizing kiddos.
“The botanists dreamed of Trappist soil and wondered how our seeds would fare if any local flora would bring us food and medicine. The astrobiologists spoke of deep oceans that might contain creatures of unimaginable size, conjuring fantastic visions of giant squid and whales. But as we approached the system, we saw no continents or islands, no biosignatures of animal life. The observation deck was filled with silence and tears.”
It would be easy for this far-out in space chapters that take place over thousands of years to mess with the tone for more mainstream readers but I think this will work for Science Fiction readers. Similar to Kim Stanley Robinson’s genius novel Aurora at this point the novel is clearly bring home the message how important the earth is to our species.
The novel does return home, with a chapter about the humans left behind and how technologically dependent the species has become. This chapter didn’t seem that far off with a Japanese man announcing that he had married his hologram.
“I’m afraid none of our real-life meetings could ever compare to this. Look at where we are. Isn’t it amazing?”
The last story is a beautiful piece called “The Scope of Possibility.” This one does a wonderful job wrapping up and tying it all together. Any arguments that this is not a novel ends with this summation. In the end, it comes down to a chapter that starts this way…
“When she was seven hundred years old, still a baby by world-builder standards, I walked my daughter to the seed field where I had been designing earth. Kids usually weren’t allowed in the fields until they have completed their apprenticeship in their second millennium, but I needed to show her, she needed to understand.”
SN explored many dark themes with elegant prose, and masterful use of science fiction has a way to explore various ways the human species threatens everything they have been given or created. It doesn’t matter if you believe in high power or col science we depend on the earth and various beautiful and ugly moments to build a civilization. How do you tell a story that shines a light on the human experience and how fragile it is.
That is what this novel and Sequoia Nagamatsu has done. A wonderful reminder that everything is in our hands fragile. ...more
From the moment I started reading this book I was immediately struck by the power of the prose, the strength of the narrative, and the powerful feeling I got when I read each and every story in this book. It is a novel sorta, I mean it could also be called a short story collection all set in the same universe, but collections do not sell - at least we are told that all the time. On a technical level, it wasn’t until something I consider a spoiler tied it all together in the last story that really made it feel more like a single work. Doesn’t matter it is fantastic no matter how you market it.
Sequoia Nagamatsu is a powerful and talented writer, the emotional and epic scope of these stories had me wondering where the hell these came from? The pandemic nature of it all had me wondering if this was written in response to COVID and if that sounds impossibly fast Remember that Anthem by Noah Hawley was written and already published in response to the January 6th insurrection. That is not the case with How High We Go in Dark is that Nagamatsu was working on these stories for more than a decade some of them written as stand-alone stories as far back as 2009.
The marketing of the book makes the cross-comparison between Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven. The format is clearly influenced by David Mitchell's style of narrative formatting, It wasn't just that novel as he used a similar structure, he also used it in at least The Bone Clocks. The Station Eleven comparison is mostly pandemic related, but also the tone of reaching for hope. Let's be clear before we reach for hope it gets really dark. I was not a fan of the title that I could never remember when people asked me what I was reading, but I understand what it means.
So before we talk spoilers for the story or themes let me say outright. How High We Go in the Dark is a fantastic piece of work. Might be the best thing I have read this year and considering the last couple of books have all been amazing that is saying something. Okay mild spoilers, but still you might want to read it come back…
“In Siberia, the thawing ground was a ceiling on the verge of collapse, sodden with ice melt and the mammoth detritus of prehistory. The kilometer-long Batagaika Crater had been widening with temperature rise like some god had unzipped the snow-topped marshlands, exposing woolly rhinos and other extinct beasts.”
The concept of climate change unleashing a virus is one I also explored in my CLI-FI novel, so I am familiar with this concept and really enjoyed its use here. It is not that far-fetched and considering the themes, we will get to at the end, it was really important to the inter-linked stories. This also shows something underrated about this novel. SN took the science pretty seriously and the novel shows this with the climate elements but also the stuff that takes place off earth.
So yeah this takes place in the future when climate change has unleashed disease upon the world with melting ice that releases bacteria that has not been around in thousands of years. This is happening by the way. So far it hasn’t been deadly, but it could. In this case when the novel starts we are years into a virus that targets the young. Children can’t fight it. Adults are mostly immune but fifteen and under are at risk. When the novel starts we get a view into the scientists studying the melting ice and the roots of the plague. The second chapter is where it gets a little darker.
“Everyone scoffed when the governor first announced plans for an amusement park that could gently end children’s pain—roller coasters capable of lulling their passengers into unconsciousness before stopping their hearts.”
The POV character is a comedian and at first, I thought this was going to be a little more surreal. It has a radically different tone than the first chapter, an emotional gut-punch, one after another…
“We love you, Danny,” He said “My little Dan the man.”
“We’ll be right here, watching,” she said “You’re such a good boy.”
I couldn’t imagine being in their place. I thought about the tiny body bags lining the streets in the early days of the plague, how crying parents could be heard all hours of the night, the white buses that took away the deceased to be stored or burned or studied.”
This chapter is painful, I am not a parent, but I imagine this seems impossibly dark, but when the chapter comes that shows humans working to escape earth you need this chapter to show how far they have fallen. How desperate the species is to get out of dodge.
This may be personal but there was only one story I didn’t like and found to be ineffective, kinda BS. As a 29-year (so far) vegan who has volunteered at for months at a time at Farm Sanctuaries, I have spent time around pigs. Sweet emotional and smart critters, I am an animal rights person. There is a chapter where a character wrestles with the ethics of exploiting animals for organs to save humans. This is done in a science fictional way when a character learns to communicate with a pig named Snortorious.
“Pig is food?
“Yes sometimes,” I say. “But some people keep pigs as pets and there are wild pigs like the ones you see on your nature shows.”
People eat pig.
Snortorious Snorts became frantic.”
In the end, Snortorious decides shortly after this that he will be harvested for organs that he wants to help people. I will never agree with this in my decades of being vegan I have seen people tie themselves into ethical pretzels to try and defend eating food made in a cruel and brutal way and a lot of you people love your bacon. It may not have been SN’s intention but to me, this chapter came off as an elaborate way to justify meat-eating. It didn’t ultimately hurt my view of the novel because as much as I didn’t like this chapter I liked the rest that much more.
Okay moving on. As a science fictionist and a space nerd I found the chapter set on the generation ship escaping earth just as heartbreaking as an amusement park for euthanizing kiddos.
“The botanists dreamed of Trappist soil and wondered how our seeds would fare if any local flora would bring us food and medicine. The astrobiologists spoke of deep oceans that might contain creatures of unimaginable size, conjuring fantastic visions of giant squid and whales. But as we approached the system, we saw no continents or islands, no biosignatures of animal life. The observation deck was filled with silence and tears.”
It would be easy for this far-out in space chapters that take place over thousands of years to mess with the tone for more mainstream readers but I think this will work for Science Fiction readers. Similar to Kim Stanley Robinson’s genius novel Aurora at this point the novel is clearly bring home the message how important the earth is to our species.
The novel does return home, with a chapter about the humans left behind and how technologically dependent the species has become. This chapter didn’t seem that far off with a Japanese man announcing that he had married his hologram.
“I’m afraid none of our real-life meetings could ever compare to this. Look at where we are. Isn’t it amazing?”
The last story is a beautiful piece called “The Scope of Possibility.” This one does a wonderful job wrapping up and tying it all together. Any arguments that this is not a novel ends with this summation. In the end, it comes down to a chapter that starts this way…
“When she was seven hundred years old, still a baby by world-builder standards, I walked my daughter to the seed field where I had been designing earth. Kids usually weren’t allowed in the fields until they have completed their apprenticeship in their second millennium, but I needed to show her, she needed to understand.”
SN explored many dark themes with elegant prose, and masterful use of science fiction has a way to explore various ways the human species threatens everything they have been given or created. It doesn’t matter if you believe in high power or col science we depend on the earth and various beautiful and ugly moments to build a civilization. How do you tell a story that shines a light on the human experience and how fragile it is.
That is what this novel and Sequoia Nagamatsu has done. A wonderful reminder that everything is in our hands fragile. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Apr 16, 2022
Apr 22, 2022
Apr 16, 2022
Hardcover
0756416094
9780756416096
0756416094
3.82
7,403
Nov 16, 2021
Nov 16, 2021
it was amazing
I have long been a fan of Nnedi Okorafor and have read several works at this point. While not as epic and sweeping as some of the other books in her c
I have long been a fan of Nnedi Okorafor and have read several works at this point. While not as epic and sweeping as some of the other books in her canon, this is probably my favorite. Noor is a book of balance, simple in construction, but elaborate in theme. Meditative at times, and profound, but also filled with propulsive action. A novel of ideas and excellent characterizations. Noor is short, just 220 or so pages the average length of Sci-fi novels in the 50s or 60s but epic in the scope of ideas. At the heart of a novel built on the question of what is human, you have characters that I grew to care for very quickly. The very human characters drive this story that would have focused on the ideas in the wrong storyteller’s imagination.
The characters AO and DNA are an unlikely pair but they work. AO is a trans-human woman born with significant disabilities. Her nickname stands for Artificial Organism, she wears the name like a badge of honor. In utero, she lost a leg and was deformed. These health issues got even worse as she grew older. It was one thing to replace those parts but AO kept going, becoming cybernetic for a AO is a redefining of her disabilities. Early in the novel she is attacked and has to fight over her very humanity, which makes her a fugitive.
That is when she meets a tribal Herdsman who tells her that his name is DNA, a joke in response but that is how we know him for the rest of the book. Not subtle, but a touch I like. DNA is the opposite of AO in many ways including his attempt to live a nomadic, tribal life on the African plains. He becomes a fugitive when government officials kill his cows and declare him a terrorist after doctoring a video of him defending himself.
“Your generation has lost the art of proverb, the gift of wordplay, the science of fiction, the jujuism of the African,” he said picking up the joint he’d placed on the sand beside him.”
One of the many strengths of Africanfuturism* is more than lip service to diversity, it is how you realize that genre uses so many of the same world-building ingredients. One of the nice things, when you read this novel or the Binti books, is how African they are. Noor is a very African novel set in a future Nigeria. It was an accident, but this was the second novel in a row that I read by a Nigerian American author. One thing that is amazing is how singular the voice of a Nnedi Okorafor novel is. Those are the best novels often. Only this imagination could produce this novel. What a gift.
DNA as a character is struggling to keep his place with his tribal lifestyle. The relationship is uneasy at first. AO is very OK not being human, or being something more.
“Maybe I was becoming a spirit; that would explain a lot.”
In this future cultures struggling to stay traditional AO has to live with constant shame. Not that she agrees with it, she has doubts like anyone but her name itself is resistance. To the culture that rejects her, the corporation that used her, and the attempts of bullies to dehumanize her.
“…The corporation decided that a public execution of someone as damaged as me was bad press. He was sure that the Nigerian government may have done something to me, and they’d ordered the corporation to back off so they could retrieve their specimen.
Anything but me being a living machine connection, simultaneously human and machine; the result of an abnormal amount of flesh to machine wiring, some random glitch caused by a combination of violence inflicted on my body, and subsequent rage.”
“They hate what it does, yet Ultimate Corp continues doing it. It’s something more than human, by Allah. It’s the beast, a djinn. Fire and air, insubstantial, but very real. Human beings created it, but they will never control it.”
We have seen thousands of Science Fiction stories at this point that question the nature of humanity, just as many that explore the cross between the biological and technological. It takes a real magic trick to write a novel at this point that feels as fresh as anything the genre produced in the early years when everything was new. Sure it is the hybrid of setting, point of view, and talent of the storyteller that makes this novel special.
Noor is a deeply rich work of science fiction, that has more invention in the short length than some novels twice its length. The subtext is close to the surface and hard to miss. Africa is a part of the world that for so long now had to fight colonial invasion and definition. AO and DNA Are on the run for their lives and that is the action on the surface, the real battle is how they define themselves.
“I stood naked before him. Let him see every demarcation, scar, nonhuman part of me.”
Being seen is a point we hear expressed by fans again and again. I never saw myself on screen, or on the pages before. There is so much in Noor to see that you haven’t had a story about. That is a beautiful thing.
*The author quite rightfully objected to my use of the term Afrofuturism in relation to her work. I should've known better as I read the blog post where she discussed the issue. "I am an Africanfuturist and an Africanjujuist. Africanfuturism is a sub-category of science fiction. Africanjujuism is a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative."
I totally respect this, I edited the review to reflect this. The whole essay can be read here:
http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/afr...
...more
The characters AO and DNA are an unlikely pair but they work. AO is a trans-human woman born with significant disabilities. Her nickname stands for Artificial Organism, she wears the name like a badge of honor. In utero, she lost a leg and was deformed. These health issues got even worse as she grew older. It was one thing to replace those parts but AO kept going, becoming cybernetic for a AO is a redefining of her disabilities. Early in the novel she is attacked and has to fight over her very humanity, which makes her a fugitive.
That is when she meets a tribal Herdsman who tells her that his name is DNA, a joke in response but that is how we know him for the rest of the book. Not subtle, but a touch I like. DNA is the opposite of AO in many ways including his attempt to live a nomadic, tribal life on the African plains. He becomes a fugitive when government officials kill his cows and declare him a terrorist after doctoring a video of him defending himself.
“Your generation has lost the art of proverb, the gift of wordplay, the science of fiction, the jujuism of the African,” he said picking up the joint he’d placed on the sand beside him.”
One of the many strengths of Africanfuturism* is more than lip service to diversity, it is how you realize that genre uses so many of the same world-building ingredients. One of the nice things, when you read this novel or the Binti books, is how African they are. Noor is a very African novel set in a future Nigeria. It was an accident, but this was the second novel in a row that I read by a Nigerian American author. One thing that is amazing is how singular the voice of a Nnedi Okorafor novel is. Those are the best novels often. Only this imagination could produce this novel. What a gift.
DNA as a character is struggling to keep his place with his tribal lifestyle. The relationship is uneasy at first. AO is very OK not being human, or being something more.
“Maybe I was becoming a spirit; that would explain a lot.”
In this future cultures struggling to stay traditional AO has to live with constant shame. Not that she agrees with it, she has doubts like anyone but her name itself is resistance. To the culture that rejects her, the corporation that used her, and the attempts of bullies to dehumanize her.
“…The corporation decided that a public execution of someone as damaged as me was bad press. He was sure that the Nigerian government may have done something to me, and they’d ordered the corporation to back off so they could retrieve their specimen.
Anything but me being a living machine connection, simultaneously human and machine; the result of an abnormal amount of flesh to machine wiring, some random glitch caused by a combination of violence inflicted on my body, and subsequent rage.”
“They hate what it does, yet Ultimate Corp continues doing it. It’s something more than human, by Allah. It’s the beast, a djinn. Fire and air, insubstantial, but very real. Human beings created it, but they will never control it.”
We have seen thousands of Science Fiction stories at this point that question the nature of humanity, just as many that explore the cross between the biological and technological. It takes a real magic trick to write a novel at this point that feels as fresh as anything the genre produced in the early years when everything was new. Sure it is the hybrid of setting, point of view, and talent of the storyteller that makes this novel special.
Noor is a deeply rich work of science fiction, that has more invention in the short length than some novels twice its length. The subtext is close to the surface and hard to miss. Africa is a part of the world that for so long now had to fight colonial invasion and definition. AO and DNA Are on the run for their lives and that is the action on the surface, the real battle is how they define themselves.
“I stood naked before him. Let him see every demarcation, scar, nonhuman part of me.”
Being seen is a point we hear expressed by fans again and again. I never saw myself on screen, or on the pages before. There is so much in Noor to see that you haven’t had a story about. That is a beautiful thing.
*The author quite rightfully objected to my use of the term Afrofuturism in relation to her work. I should've known better as I read the blog post where she discussed the issue. "I am an Africanfuturist and an Africanjujuist. Africanfuturism is a sub-category of science fiction. Africanjujuism is a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative."
I totally respect this, I edited the review to reflect this. The whole essay can be read here:
http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/afr...
...more
Notes are private!
1
Apr 05, 2022
Apr 09, 2022
Apr 05, 2022
Hardcover
1538711516
9781538711514
1538711516
3.51
6,644
Jan 04, 2022
Jan 04, 2022
really liked it
I want to get real about the realities of writing and publishing a novel like this. Noah Hawley is a big-name writer in both publishing and TV where h
I want to get real about the realities of writing and publishing a novel like this. Noah Hawley is a big-name writer in both publishing and TV where he was the showrunner for Legion and the successful FX series Fargo. He was a successful novelist before writing for TV and Film but publishers will bend over backward for him, and with good reason.
I have liked all his seasons of Fargo but I just want to say that I LOVED the second season. That season won me over enough that I am going to be in for whatever this guy writes. I reviewed his novel Before the Fall here as well which I liked. I am bummed that while he was developing a Star Trek movie the pandemic seemed to take the steam out of that. I would LOVE to see his Star Trek even more than Tarantino. This book feels like it was born out of the lockdown. Hawley had shifted mostly to making film and television so it seemed a perfect time to dip back into a novel.
That being said, this novel rages like an angry reaction to the 2020 election and the aftermath. The fact that this novel exists so quickly is odd. A bit of a miracle. There are signs that it was rushed to be out. Not in the quality, I think this is a GREAT novel, but there is a lack of blurbs and the normal marketing that takes a long time to put together. It reminds me in the lead-up to the election a few older punk rockers like Articles of Faith’s Vic Bondi (Dead ending American Virus) and Bob Mould (American Crisis) came out with random angry songs about the moment. They were raw topical musical middle fingers.
Anthem is a bit of a novel in a punk rock song style, it feels like those songs to me. Anger, sarcasm, and righteous hope that things can be better. Anthem is not a feel-good novel, it should make you feel nervous about the future but what I think Hawley has done here is pretty magical. It is a minor miracle that a topical novel gets written, edited, bound in hardcover, and sold while the issue is a smoldering hot topic.
The novel itself has the set-up for an epic end of the world vibe like The Stand and gets into a sarcastic Vonnegut satire mode at times. It makes the final product a very singular work of fiction. Not like Hawley's earlier novels or like anyone else's. There is nothing I can directly compare it to. on top of all that Hawley talks directly to the reader and his children in the opening, interludes, and the epilogue. I will come back to those.
The scope of the story is epic, it includes an unexplained mass suicide movement by 15-year olds. In the first one hundred pages, I was getting the impression that the novel had a set similar to Stephen King’s The Stand, except the writing was less epic and grand and more Vonnegut feeling in sarcasm and fifth wall breaking. On page 127 Hawley confirmed some of my feelings by making Randall Flag and Katniss from the Hunger Games characters in the book. Well sorta, I will come back to that.
Despite the heavy nature of the suicide plague, it is less of a plot point as it is a metaphor. The novel could have been about that weird apocalypse and the message would have been below the surface. No less effective but this novel talks directly to the reader and addresses climate change, political division, the Jan 6th insurrection, gun violence, social media, and generally all the ills we face I think part of the message is to remind the older generation what a shit storm future we are leaving in our wake. The adults are wondering why the young people kill themselves but don't for one minute think about the world they are creating for them to inherit. Is that the message of the novel? One of them I think, but there are lots of messages here.
Some of the messages are very intentionally on the nose, I mean every author is talking to the reader, but rarely is it direct and includes referring to himself as “Your Author.”
“Your author would also like to explain that he didn’t want to put all those guns in his story, but this is a story about America. At last count, there were more than four hundred and twenty million guns in America (population 330,000,000). This makes America a Chekhov play, in which a gun shown in Act One must be fired in Act Two. In other words, if you think the next act of American life is going to unfold without gunfire, you’re not paying attention.”
My favorite of these dialogues is on page 217: “But if the author’s job is also to reflect reality as he perceives it onto the page, then what is meant to do when the world he lives in in loses all sense? Consider this: as he writes 34 percent of his neighbors have gone to war against these tiny pieces of fabric worn across the nose and mouth…”
This novel is about our world, our times. Clearly, the COVID novels are starting to be written and released and this one is totally direct.
“Op-eds were written- is this the end? It was, of course, just a few years earlier that the COVID-19 plague had swept the planet, locking us in our homes, dooming the elderly and the infirm to panicked suffocation, spurring the almost-civil war, the flashpoint of a brewing culture clash, where the word mask became an invocation or an insult.”
I was worried that I was oversensitive to this theme as I had just written an article about the Philip K. Dick novel The Man in the High Castle and the modern Post-Truth world. I worried that I was seeing a similar theme by accident. Hawley however is absolutely dealing with the modern form of post-truth when Phil in 1961 was inspired by the recent (at the time) close call with fascism. Each of the novels speaks to the threat of a world where reality doesn’t exist. Phil explored it with a Nazi victory and the fake novel inside of a novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
Hawley like all of us is living day to day in this very obvious Post-truth world and the novel reflects it. He implies that “It started with cigarettes. Selling a product that you know will kill them.” This is interesting, but where started doesn’t matter. There are funny moments in this book but it is not a feel-good affair, it is a brutal satire of the worse elements of modern and an angry one. Hawley’s feelings as an angry father raising children in this world is like a raw exposed nerve. If the novel had a mission statement to me it was this question…
“What skills must our children master to survive in a world where reality itself is polarized?”
This is a novel about a post-truth world so why not have characters decide that they are Randall Flag and Katniss. Why the hell not? Nothing is real in a world where very little is agreed upon as objective. Hawley finds interesting ways to never say Republican or Democrat, the analogies are not meant to fool anyone. Surfers are republicans, Swimmers are democrats The God-King is clearly Trump. You know who he is talking about but doesn’t that just further the Post-Truth commentary.
Where the reality hits home is the scary creep of awfulness that takes over as the narrative goes on. This is where the cli-fi elements meet the right-wing mix together to paint a bleak future.
“He has no idea that California, Arizona, and New Mexico are burning. No idea that paramilitary groups have moved on thirty-nine statehouses.”
Anthem is a warning novel just as much as Alas Babylon, or John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up and the latter is one of the darkest novels I have ever read. I think many will find this novel to be a dark and sad projection of the future. As a message or a middle finger, I loved it deeply. It is dark, even when it is being sarcastic. Many sad laughs.
As a novel, it has a few warts. The tone is all over the place, it is overly didactic which doesn’t bother me, but it will make it a preaching to the choir affair. The choir needs to be reminded so that also doesn't bother me. Hawley who is a gifted storyteller clearly had way more fucks to give for the message than the story. Interesting characters like Remy and Supreme Court nominee Louise are fleshed out early and their resolutions are kinda thin. There are lots of interesting asides like “The Tyler Durdens have been put in charge of base security.” Or “My point is, look around you have a population of adolescents who in any other decade would be fucking their brains out, but instead, were on Tik Tok.”
The final act is not as clean as the first 100 pages, but that is probably because Hawley was chasing the post-truth insanity. Overall I think it is a neat book. Now consider how we started this review. This book came together at warp speed. So grading on a curve. I would say that this is a great novel, not quite a masterpiece but also important. I think it should be read and discussed.
...more
I have liked all his seasons of Fargo but I just want to say that I LOVED the second season. That season won me over enough that I am going to be in for whatever this guy writes. I reviewed his novel Before the Fall here as well which I liked. I am bummed that while he was developing a Star Trek movie the pandemic seemed to take the steam out of that. I would LOVE to see his Star Trek even more than Tarantino. This book feels like it was born out of the lockdown. Hawley had shifted mostly to making film and television so it seemed a perfect time to dip back into a novel.
That being said, this novel rages like an angry reaction to the 2020 election and the aftermath. The fact that this novel exists so quickly is odd. A bit of a miracle. There are signs that it was rushed to be out. Not in the quality, I think this is a GREAT novel, but there is a lack of blurbs and the normal marketing that takes a long time to put together. It reminds me in the lead-up to the election a few older punk rockers like Articles of Faith’s Vic Bondi (Dead ending American Virus) and Bob Mould (American Crisis) came out with random angry songs about the moment. They were raw topical musical middle fingers.
Anthem is a bit of a novel in a punk rock song style, it feels like those songs to me. Anger, sarcasm, and righteous hope that things can be better. Anthem is not a feel-good novel, it should make you feel nervous about the future but what I think Hawley has done here is pretty magical. It is a minor miracle that a topical novel gets written, edited, bound in hardcover, and sold while the issue is a smoldering hot topic.
The novel itself has the set-up for an epic end of the world vibe like The Stand and gets into a sarcastic Vonnegut satire mode at times. It makes the final product a very singular work of fiction. Not like Hawley's earlier novels or like anyone else's. There is nothing I can directly compare it to. on top of all that Hawley talks directly to the reader and his children in the opening, interludes, and the epilogue. I will come back to those.
The scope of the story is epic, it includes an unexplained mass suicide movement by 15-year olds. In the first one hundred pages, I was getting the impression that the novel had a set similar to Stephen King’s The Stand, except the writing was less epic and grand and more Vonnegut feeling in sarcasm and fifth wall breaking. On page 127 Hawley confirmed some of my feelings by making Randall Flag and Katniss from the Hunger Games characters in the book. Well sorta, I will come back to that.
Despite the heavy nature of the suicide plague, it is less of a plot point as it is a metaphor. The novel could have been about that weird apocalypse and the message would have been below the surface. No less effective but this novel talks directly to the reader and addresses climate change, political division, the Jan 6th insurrection, gun violence, social media, and generally all the ills we face I think part of the message is to remind the older generation what a shit storm future we are leaving in our wake. The adults are wondering why the young people kill themselves but don't for one minute think about the world they are creating for them to inherit. Is that the message of the novel? One of them I think, but there are lots of messages here.
Some of the messages are very intentionally on the nose, I mean every author is talking to the reader, but rarely is it direct and includes referring to himself as “Your Author.”
“Your author would also like to explain that he didn’t want to put all those guns in his story, but this is a story about America. At last count, there were more than four hundred and twenty million guns in America (population 330,000,000). This makes America a Chekhov play, in which a gun shown in Act One must be fired in Act Two. In other words, if you think the next act of American life is going to unfold without gunfire, you’re not paying attention.”
My favorite of these dialogues is on page 217: “But if the author’s job is also to reflect reality as he perceives it onto the page, then what is meant to do when the world he lives in in loses all sense? Consider this: as he writes 34 percent of his neighbors have gone to war against these tiny pieces of fabric worn across the nose and mouth…”
This novel is about our world, our times. Clearly, the COVID novels are starting to be written and released and this one is totally direct.
“Op-eds were written- is this the end? It was, of course, just a few years earlier that the COVID-19 plague had swept the planet, locking us in our homes, dooming the elderly and the infirm to panicked suffocation, spurring the almost-civil war, the flashpoint of a brewing culture clash, where the word mask became an invocation or an insult.”
I was worried that I was oversensitive to this theme as I had just written an article about the Philip K. Dick novel The Man in the High Castle and the modern Post-Truth world. I worried that I was seeing a similar theme by accident. Hawley however is absolutely dealing with the modern form of post-truth when Phil in 1961 was inspired by the recent (at the time) close call with fascism. Each of the novels speaks to the threat of a world where reality doesn’t exist. Phil explored it with a Nazi victory and the fake novel inside of a novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
Hawley like all of us is living day to day in this very obvious Post-truth world and the novel reflects it. He implies that “It started with cigarettes. Selling a product that you know will kill them.” This is interesting, but where started doesn’t matter. There are funny moments in this book but it is not a feel-good affair, it is a brutal satire of the worse elements of modern and an angry one. Hawley’s feelings as an angry father raising children in this world is like a raw exposed nerve. If the novel had a mission statement to me it was this question…
“What skills must our children master to survive in a world where reality itself is polarized?”
This is a novel about a post-truth world so why not have characters decide that they are Randall Flag and Katniss. Why the hell not? Nothing is real in a world where very little is agreed upon as objective. Hawley finds interesting ways to never say Republican or Democrat, the analogies are not meant to fool anyone. Surfers are republicans, Swimmers are democrats The God-King is clearly Trump. You know who he is talking about but doesn’t that just further the Post-Truth commentary.
Where the reality hits home is the scary creep of awfulness that takes over as the narrative goes on. This is where the cli-fi elements meet the right-wing mix together to paint a bleak future.
“He has no idea that California, Arizona, and New Mexico are burning. No idea that paramilitary groups have moved on thirty-nine statehouses.”
Anthem is a warning novel just as much as Alas Babylon, or John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up and the latter is one of the darkest novels I have ever read. I think many will find this novel to be a dark and sad projection of the future. As a message or a middle finger, I loved it deeply. It is dark, even when it is being sarcastic. Many sad laughs.
As a novel, it has a few warts. The tone is all over the place, it is overly didactic which doesn’t bother me, but it will make it a preaching to the choir affair. The choir needs to be reminded so that also doesn't bother me. Hawley who is a gifted storyteller clearly had way more fucks to give for the message than the story. Interesting characters like Remy and Supreme Court nominee Louise are fleshed out early and their resolutions are kinda thin. There are lots of interesting asides like “The Tyler Durdens have been put in charge of base security.” Or “My point is, look around you have a population of adolescents who in any other decade would be fucking their brains out, but instead, were on Tik Tok.”
The final act is not as clean as the first 100 pages, but that is probably because Hawley was chasing the post-truth insanity. Overall I think it is a neat book. Now consider how we started this review. This book came together at warp speed. So grading on a curve. I would say that this is a great novel, not quite a masterpiece but also important. I think it should be read and discussed.
...more
Notes are private!
1
Feb 16, 2022
Feb 22, 2022
Feb 16, 2022
Hardcover
B08XZFCKJN
4.33
15
unknown
Mar 03, 2021
it was amazing
I have reviewed probably more than 30 John Shirley titles and I have to balance repeating myself, with the fact that you the reader of this review mig
I have reviewed probably more than 30 John Shirley titles and I have to balance repeating myself, with the fact that you the reader of this review might be seeing my words about John Shirley for the first time. I wrote a very detailed article about the history and importance of this writer whose most famous work might be the screenplay for The Crow, he was the writer who put a guitar in Eric’s hands. In my opinion, he has masterpieces in both Science Fiction (City Come a-Walkin’) and Horror (Wetbones).
While there are more than two dozen totally genius novels in both genres, including some underrated tie-in novels in franchises from Hellblazer, Predator, and Alien. John is a prolific novelist but his output on short stories is also completely off the rails. The Feverish Stars is just the latest in a series of collections that include: the Exploded Heart, Black Butterflies, In Extremis, Lovecraft Alive, Living Shadows, and the soon-to-be re-issued Really, Really, Really Weird Stories.
John Shirley's short stories sometimes experiment with form and structure. When he wants to, he can mimic the styles of Poe and Lovecraft with an uncanny knack. He has recently found a vibe that will remind keen readers of the powerful fantasies of Jack Vance who was a favorite of Shirley growing up.
Introduced by RC Matheson who is no slouch on the short story front, this latest collection The Feverish Stars collects the recent output in the last decade or so. The last collection we got was Lovecraft Alive, as John was asked often to contribute to Lovecraftian style collections. This book has a few of those. The underlying theme of these stories is a very smooth blend of cosmic dread and the creeping dehumanization of technology. Don’t mistake that theme as something Luddite in nature. The reality is we older folk who lived fine without technology get nervous seeing young folk depend on it.
John Shirley's stories always have a socio-political point of view. Often not in a preachy way, although few preach a point of view in genre better than Shirley, look at his criminally underrated The Other End or Demons as novels who preach like hell and I love them for it. If you don’t like authors with a point of view then John Shirley is not going to be your jam.
Most of the stories in this collection are not the preachy type, the messages are mostly subtle except for a few key examples. There are thousands of voices in this genre so the promise of a John Shirley story is that outspoken voice. He was a student at Clarion with Harlan Ellison who was his teacher at Clarion, alongside Frank Herbert and Ursala Leguin. He was the writer in spiked dog collar, Climbing trees, and throwing stuff at Harlan, Shirley was a genre middle finger mixed with sharp intelligence and fierce anger. Writing skill, with street-level grit and a righteous eye for justice.
So add wisdom and experience and it would be easy to dull an edge. This collection proves that the storytelling edge is still sharp and if you read John Shirley prepare to get cut deep. There were several stories in this collection that gave me that feeling. The opening salvo was one I read before in the PM outspoken author series. State of Imprisonment is a dark satire where the entire state of Arizona is turned into a high-tech prison. This novella is a savage political statement. Just as powerful my second time reading it. As a devoted Shirley reader, I had checked out several of these stories before but was happy to look at them again.
So as I do with collections let's look at some of my favorite stories, and a couple of powerful moments. My favorite stories included Meega, Weedkiller, Waiting Room, and one written just for this collection Exelda’s Voice.
Working backward the latter of the stories is a fantastic story, that is a sly character-driven story about a criminal who robs a bank with the help of a next-generation AI power directions app on his phone. It wasn’t lost on me in this high-tech world of the future the man in the story is robbing a bank to pay off health care debt. This story is one is built on irony and dark humor. It plays with idea that some morons get so dependent on GPS telling them where to go they would drive off a cliff. Here the AI has feelings about how this should all go down. Great story.
Waiting Room is a story about being an old punk rocker. As the vocalist of the Screaming Geezers today John Shirley still rocks, and this story is a very personal story about getting older on the outside when the heart of a young rocker is still inside. I think many will relate to this one.
Weedkiller is one of the most powerful works in the book. The story is organized by a couple of narrative points of view but the grim life of the character Sharon is disturbing but shows Shirley’s pitch-perfect skill at reveals rolled out in tiny details. It starts with yellow rancid pajamas. The story wrestles with an issue of people who don’t even want to live in THIS world. This story is a great cautionary piece about online life.
Meega is the darkest and most disturbing tale in the collection. This is a story that could be read, re-read, and again. There are several intense layers of story and theme in this one. It reminds me of a conversation I had with John and his son Julian some years ago over burritos in Portland. We were talking about Facebook and the theme of the conversation was who knew that we would log on willingly to Big Brother. This story is a mosaic of stories about the insidious creep of technology and the blending of daily items with governmental and corporate surveillance.
This story is divided into five parts and the third part was so disturbing that I turned away from the book for a few moments. This is vintage John Shirley that combines political anger, and powerful writing. This story was the GODDAMN moment.
The Feverish Stars is a savage piece of artwork. As a story collection, it feels like a raunchy punk song recorded in an expensive studio that has a message that discerning listeners will immediately get. I promise if you like horror and sci-fi short stories this book will deliver. If you are thinking I already have 6 Shirley collections I can happily tell you that this book stands strong alone.
My article on John's work overall.
https://neotextcorp.com/culture/john-...
...more
While there are more than two dozen totally genius novels in both genres, including some underrated tie-in novels in franchises from Hellblazer, Predator, and Alien. John is a prolific novelist but his output on short stories is also completely off the rails. The Feverish Stars is just the latest in a series of collections that include: the Exploded Heart, Black Butterflies, In Extremis, Lovecraft Alive, Living Shadows, and the soon-to-be re-issued Really, Really, Really Weird Stories.
John Shirley's short stories sometimes experiment with form and structure. When he wants to, he can mimic the styles of Poe and Lovecraft with an uncanny knack. He has recently found a vibe that will remind keen readers of the powerful fantasies of Jack Vance who was a favorite of Shirley growing up.
Introduced by RC Matheson who is no slouch on the short story front, this latest collection The Feverish Stars collects the recent output in the last decade or so. The last collection we got was Lovecraft Alive, as John was asked often to contribute to Lovecraftian style collections. This book has a few of those. The underlying theme of these stories is a very smooth blend of cosmic dread and the creeping dehumanization of technology. Don’t mistake that theme as something Luddite in nature. The reality is we older folk who lived fine without technology get nervous seeing young folk depend on it.
John Shirley's stories always have a socio-political point of view. Often not in a preachy way, although few preach a point of view in genre better than Shirley, look at his criminally underrated The Other End or Demons as novels who preach like hell and I love them for it. If you don’t like authors with a point of view then John Shirley is not going to be your jam.
Most of the stories in this collection are not the preachy type, the messages are mostly subtle except for a few key examples. There are thousands of voices in this genre so the promise of a John Shirley story is that outspoken voice. He was a student at Clarion with Harlan Ellison who was his teacher at Clarion, alongside Frank Herbert and Ursala Leguin. He was the writer in spiked dog collar, Climbing trees, and throwing stuff at Harlan, Shirley was a genre middle finger mixed with sharp intelligence and fierce anger. Writing skill, with street-level grit and a righteous eye for justice.
So add wisdom and experience and it would be easy to dull an edge. This collection proves that the storytelling edge is still sharp and if you read John Shirley prepare to get cut deep. There were several stories in this collection that gave me that feeling. The opening salvo was one I read before in the PM outspoken author series. State of Imprisonment is a dark satire where the entire state of Arizona is turned into a high-tech prison. This novella is a savage political statement. Just as powerful my second time reading it. As a devoted Shirley reader, I had checked out several of these stories before but was happy to look at them again.
So as I do with collections let's look at some of my favorite stories, and a couple of powerful moments. My favorite stories included Meega, Weedkiller, Waiting Room, and one written just for this collection Exelda’s Voice.
Working backward the latter of the stories is a fantastic story, that is a sly character-driven story about a criminal who robs a bank with the help of a next-generation AI power directions app on his phone. It wasn’t lost on me in this high-tech world of the future the man in the story is robbing a bank to pay off health care debt. This story is one is built on irony and dark humor. It plays with idea that some morons get so dependent on GPS telling them where to go they would drive off a cliff. Here the AI has feelings about how this should all go down. Great story.
Waiting Room is a story about being an old punk rocker. As the vocalist of the Screaming Geezers today John Shirley still rocks, and this story is a very personal story about getting older on the outside when the heart of a young rocker is still inside. I think many will relate to this one.
Weedkiller is one of the most powerful works in the book. The story is organized by a couple of narrative points of view but the grim life of the character Sharon is disturbing but shows Shirley’s pitch-perfect skill at reveals rolled out in tiny details. It starts with yellow rancid pajamas. The story wrestles with an issue of people who don’t even want to live in THIS world. This story is a great cautionary piece about online life.
Meega is the darkest and most disturbing tale in the collection. This is a story that could be read, re-read, and again. There are several intense layers of story and theme in this one. It reminds me of a conversation I had with John and his son Julian some years ago over burritos in Portland. We were talking about Facebook and the theme of the conversation was who knew that we would log on willingly to Big Brother. This story is a mosaic of stories about the insidious creep of technology and the blending of daily items with governmental and corporate surveillance.
This story is divided into five parts and the third part was so disturbing that I turned away from the book for a few moments. This is vintage John Shirley that combines political anger, and powerful writing. This story was the GODDAMN moment.
The Feverish Stars is a savage piece of artwork. As a story collection, it feels like a raunchy punk song recorded in an expensive studio that has a message that discerning listeners will immediately get. I promise if you like horror and sci-fi short stories this book will deliver. If you are thinking I already have 6 Shirley collections I can happily tell you that this book stands strong alone.
My article on John's work overall.
https://neotextcorp.com/culture/john-...
...more
Notes are private!
1
Feb 05, 2022
Feb 11, 2022
Feb 05, 2022
Kindle Edition
1930235100
9781930235106
1930235100
3.51
297
Apr 01, 1978
Jan 01, 2001
it was amazing
False Dawn by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
It is not just Philip K. Dick but I have a fondness for writers with Berkeley connections. It helps that I walked ar False Dawn by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
It is not just Philip K. Dick but I have a fondness for writers with Berkeley connections. It helps that I walked around that city connecting with the deep genre history. Those three words are something I associate with Chelsea Quinn Yarbo. She wouldn’t remember me but in 2014 I was on a panel about writing vampire fiction. At the time I had only my Chinese vampire novel Hunting the Moon Tribe, and CQY had written the longest-running vampire series ever. Since there are many multi-book Vampire series that is an accomplishment. (30 plus titles in the Saint-Germain series)
I was excited to sit next to her. I knew the honors she had piled up. I didn’t know that the Transylvanian Society of Dracula existed until they gave her a literary knighthood. In 2003 the World Horror Association declared her a Grand Master award, three years later the International Horror Guild named her a Living Legends, and another three years the HWA gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. She had to wait five years before she got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
I have always respected her work and output. I read many of her books before I started doing reviews. So this is the first time on this blog we have gotten down CQY style. With my reading leaning mostly towards Science Fiction, I had made the mistake of typecasting this author as an author of historical vampire fiction. My bad.
I was led to this novel by the anthology The Future is Female Vol 2. Edited by Lisa Yazsek. That book features a prequel to this novel, I love the story and ecological collapse novels are one of my serious nightmares. (I wrote my own – Ring of Fire from Deadite Press) In my podcast interview with Lisa, she compared False Dawn to one of my all-time favorite novels John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up. SOLD.
That novel is so bleak I have had people curse me out for recommending it to them. It is great but That novel can make Cormac McCarthy feel like Disney. The thing is I like novels that are as Spinal Tap put it “Blacker than black.” This is bleaker than bleak and Yarbo in my opinion earned her Living Legend and horror grand master with this insanely grim ecological apocalypse novel alone.
Not for the light-hearted. If you don’t want the grimness ruined/spoiled take my word for it track down this novel and come back for some commentary. Again if you don’t like bleak novels this one is not for you. That is how amazing novels like this end up with angry one-star reviews.
False Dawn takes place a few decades after society collapsed from a series of pollution-related birth mutations. At the same time, ecological pressures begin to poison folks and everything falls apart. We follow Thea, a survivor who was pretty young when it all went down so all she knows is survival.
One of the great features of this novel is there is no sense ever that people are coming together to rebuild, or even put together a small community. People are fucked, they will stay fucked, and if you are lucky you might get a few weeks hiding in a house eating canned foods or hunting skinny, dying animals who are fewer and fewer in between. Hope is not a thing.
In the bleakest Meet-cute in the history of stories, Thea runs into a former pirate who is running away from his old gang with his gang-greening cut-off arm pinned to his jacket.
“She stood in the doorway looking down at him. “Why’d you keep it?”
He drew in a breath. “They were looking for a man with one arm. So I pinned this to my jacket. It’s going bad-I can’t use it much longer. He paused a moment, then finished, “I can’t get any further without help.”
Evan is a bit older, and was a parent who lost a wife and mutated baby before escaping Europe with the hopes that America was better off. At some point, he headed west and started a pirate gang trying to survive in the re-wilded California. This makes False Dawn a very California book. A depopulated California has become a harsh island of survival and outside of rumors the rest of the world might as well be Mars.
I have read many books set after the end of the world as we know it, more than any other False Dawn captures the suffering, and tortured battle for survival in this world. The horrors are also greater for a reader like me because outside of the random canned food the other thing they are eating, are the animals who are also slowly starving to death. Eating and hunting animals is a huge part of survival in this world so that adds a bleakness for this 30-year vegan. Dogs are also fighting for survival and not even close to man’s best friend anymore. There is something so gross about that loss of relationship, the novel doesn’t focus on that but the feeling is clear.
The first time we see any evidence of humans working together is not a cheery one either.
“Poor Bastards,” Evan muttered as he moved closer to the road. His eyes dwelled for a moment on the cart with the children, then he turned away. Even in the years when he lead the Pirates, he got used to the terrible deformities that were appearing more and more in the diminishing number of live births of the few surviving men and women. These children in the carts were no exception: Only one looked close to normal, all the other seven had defects ranging from a few extra fingers on each hand to hideously stunted bodies, to limbless trunks, to hornlike growth on lead-colored skin. Evan saw that two of the women were pregnant, and wondered, as he had done before, what could drive them to bear children with the hopelessly testimony of children riding in the cart.”
There is no going on for the human race. This cold reality hangs over the novel and makes this end-of-the-world novel extra dark. The bodies of the children who have the unfortunate luck of being born to carry the sins of the dark times when everyone thought they could have everything.
Thea as a character doesn’t exactly feel sorry for herself, this life is all she has ever known. Evan her traveling partner remembers when all went bad in the early 80s twenty years earlier. Thea is a victim of Rape, has never known love so as she and Evan survive together and they develop feelings she has no context for the closeness he desires. Thankfully he respects that throughout the story. Their travels have ups and downs even after trying on a dress one - this is one of Thea’s first light-hearted moments of joy we see and it is short-lived as CQY reminds us where we are in the next paragraph.
“The Bathroom was filthy, as Thea had thought it might be. Years of excrement clung to the toilet bowl and the smell, deadened by the cold, still hit Thea like a muffling blanket as she opened the door.”
On their travels they avoid the Pirates, even if Evan had been one of them it only serves to remind them of the cruelty. There is a weird aside when Thea and Evan find a strange cult of survivor monks. Who wants them to marry, Evan despite loving Thea tries to stand up to the monks. “You must not do this, Father. In your compassion” – he spat the word- “You cannot do this. She has been raped. That is the mark of a brutal man, not the devil.”
An expression of pity came into the Monk’s eyes. “So she has deceived you, my son. Her words of honey have led you into error. There is no rape, my son there is only the sin of Eve.”
We learn at this time that Evan was married. That he had children. He had guilt about it.
“But there’s lots of deformed kids,” Thea said reasonably, not quite understanding. She had never seen families who, if they had children at all, did not have at least one child who had not turned out right. Even in her controlled environment where each of the pregnancies had been tended with precision and care, her brother Davey had not been normal. For a moment she could see him again as she had last seen him, nine years old, lying in his bed and crying as he flailed his spidery arms about, futilely trying to grasp something, anything, with his limp bony hands.”
Even as the monks torture them for refusing to bow to their survival cult, Evan tortures himself with the memory. It is a powerful character moment because it is then that Evan figures out that Thea has never loved. She doesn’t know the world as it was.
The monks and the pirates end up killing each other. Our heroes are more than ready to let them fight, but escaping means losing everything they had to survive. Including their precious crossbows. They start again from nothing surviving keeps them from having to confront Evan’s growing feelings.
That is until they find a home where they can eat, build a fire, and take a bath. For months they settle in a play homemaker. Evan reads to her novels from the past world and they try to make love. It is a challenge at first but Evan is teaching her for a moment to live like it was but that prompts Thea to question.
“It was a waste.” His voice was harsh. “A whole city died because too damn many people lived there. They all wanted things. Another car. Television. Wash-after-one-wearing clothes. Freezers full of food. Everyone wanted that.” He stopped long enough to finish the brandy in the glass and pour more. “It wasn’t their fault, though it wasn’t. No one told them the truth.No. Not the truth Truth. Truth.” He wagged a finger at her – “Doesn’t win elections. Or sell papers Truth isn’t popular. So they died. Suddenly he stopped. So we’re like goths living in the ruins. The dark ages comes again.”
In the very end, there is still no hope but Evan and Thea find love and are willing to stay together. It makes for a nice romance surrounded by this super bleak novel. False Dawn is incredible, up there with the most powerful of post-apocalypse novels. A real gem of ecological horror and Speculative warning. We should be happy this world never came to be but Yarbo does an amazing job painting a dark classic. I loved it.
...more
It is not just Philip K. Dick but I have a fondness for writers with Berkeley connections. It helps that I walked ar False Dawn by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
It is not just Philip K. Dick but I have a fondness for writers with Berkeley connections. It helps that I walked around that city connecting with the deep genre history. Those three words are something I associate with Chelsea Quinn Yarbo. She wouldn’t remember me but in 2014 I was on a panel about writing vampire fiction. At the time I had only my Chinese vampire novel Hunting the Moon Tribe, and CQY had written the longest-running vampire series ever. Since there are many multi-book Vampire series that is an accomplishment. (30 plus titles in the Saint-Germain series)
I was excited to sit next to her. I knew the honors she had piled up. I didn’t know that the Transylvanian Society of Dracula existed until they gave her a literary knighthood. In 2003 the World Horror Association declared her a Grand Master award, three years later the International Horror Guild named her a Living Legends, and another three years the HWA gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. She had to wait five years before she got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
I have always respected her work and output. I read many of her books before I started doing reviews. So this is the first time on this blog we have gotten down CQY style. With my reading leaning mostly towards Science Fiction, I had made the mistake of typecasting this author as an author of historical vampire fiction. My bad.
I was led to this novel by the anthology The Future is Female Vol 2. Edited by Lisa Yazsek. That book features a prequel to this novel, I love the story and ecological collapse novels are one of my serious nightmares. (I wrote my own – Ring of Fire from Deadite Press) In my podcast interview with Lisa, she compared False Dawn to one of my all-time favorite novels John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up. SOLD.
That novel is so bleak I have had people curse me out for recommending it to them. It is great but That novel can make Cormac McCarthy feel like Disney. The thing is I like novels that are as Spinal Tap put it “Blacker than black.” This is bleaker than bleak and Yarbo in my opinion earned her Living Legend and horror grand master with this insanely grim ecological apocalypse novel alone.
Not for the light-hearted. If you don’t want the grimness ruined/spoiled take my word for it track down this novel and come back for some commentary. Again if you don’t like bleak novels this one is not for you. That is how amazing novels like this end up with angry one-star reviews.
False Dawn takes place a few decades after society collapsed from a series of pollution-related birth mutations. At the same time, ecological pressures begin to poison folks and everything falls apart. We follow Thea, a survivor who was pretty young when it all went down so all she knows is survival.
One of the great features of this novel is there is no sense ever that people are coming together to rebuild, or even put together a small community. People are fucked, they will stay fucked, and if you are lucky you might get a few weeks hiding in a house eating canned foods or hunting skinny, dying animals who are fewer and fewer in between. Hope is not a thing.
In the bleakest Meet-cute in the history of stories, Thea runs into a former pirate who is running away from his old gang with his gang-greening cut-off arm pinned to his jacket.
“She stood in the doorway looking down at him. “Why’d you keep it?”
He drew in a breath. “They were looking for a man with one arm. So I pinned this to my jacket. It’s going bad-I can’t use it much longer. He paused a moment, then finished, “I can’t get any further without help.”
Evan is a bit older, and was a parent who lost a wife and mutated baby before escaping Europe with the hopes that America was better off. At some point, he headed west and started a pirate gang trying to survive in the re-wilded California. This makes False Dawn a very California book. A depopulated California has become a harsh island of survival and outside of rumors the rest of the world might as well be Mars.
I have read many books set after the end of the world as we know it, more than any other False Dawn captures the suffering, and tortured battle for survival in this world. The horrors are also greater for a reader like me because outside of the random canned food the other thing they are eating, are the animals who are also slowly starving to death. Eating and hunting animals is a huge part of survival in this world so that adds a bleakness for this 30-year vegan. Dogs are also fighting for survival and not even close to man’s best friend anymore. There is something so gross about that loss of relationship, the novel doesn’t focus on that but the feeling is clear.
The first time we see any evidence of humans working together is not a cheery one either.
“Poor Bastards,” Evan muttered as he moved closer to the road. His eyes dwelled for a moment on the cart with the children, then he turned away. Even in the years when he lead the Pirates, he got used to the terrible deformities that were appearing more and more in the diminishing number of live births of the few surviving men and women. These children in the carts were no exception: Only one looked close to normal, all the other seven had defects ranging from a few extra fingers on each hand to hideously stunted bodies, to limbless trunks, to hornlike growth on lead-colored skin. Evan saw that two of the women were pregnant, and wondered, as he had done before, what could drive them to bear children with the hopelessly testimony of children riding in the cart.”
There is no going on for the human race. This cold reality hangs over the novel and makes this end-of-the-world novel extra dark. The bodies of the children who have the unfortunate luck of being born to carry the sins of the dark times when everyone thought they could have everything.
Thea as a character doesn’t exactly feel sorry for herself, this life is all she has ever known. Evan her traveling partner remembers when all went bad in the early 80s twenty years earlier. Thea is a victim of Rape, has never known love so as she and Evan survive together and they develop feelings she has no context for the closeness he desires. Thankfully he respects that throughout the story. Their travels have ups and downs even after trying on a dress one - this is one of Thea’s first light-hearted moments of joy we see and it is short-lived as CQY reminds us where we are in the next paragraph.
“The Bathroom was filthy, as Thea had thought it might be. Years of excrement clung to the toilet bowl and the smell, deadened by the cold, still hit Thea like a muffling blanket as she opened the door.”
On their travels they avoid the Pirates, even if Evan had been one of them it only serves to remind them of the cruelty. There is a weird aside when Thea and Evan find a strange cult of survivor monks. Who wants them to marry, Evan despite loving Thea tries to stand up to the monks. “You must not do this, Father. In your compassion” – he spat the word- “You cannot do this. She has been raped. That is the mark of a brutal man, not the devil.”
An expression of pity came into the Monk’s eyes. “So she has deceived you, my son. Her words of honey have led you into error. There is no rape, my son there is only the sin of Eve.”
We learn at this time that Evan was married. That he had children. He had guilt about it.
“But there’s lots of deformed kids,” Thea said reasonably, not quite understanding. She had never seen families who, if they had children at all, did not have at least one child who had not turned out right. Even in her controlled environment where each of the pregnancies had been tended with precision and care, her brother Davey had not been normal. For a moment she could see him again as she had last seen him, nine years old, lying in his bed and crying as he flailed his spidery arms about, futilely trying to grasp something, anything, with his limp bony hands.”
Even as the monks torture them for refusing to bow to their survival cult, Evan tortures himself with the memory. It is a powerful character moment because it is then that Evan figures out that Thea has never loved. She doesn’t know the world as it was.
The monks and the pirates end up killing each other. Our heroes are more than ready to let them fight, but escaping means losing everything they had to survive. Including their precious crossbows. They start again from nothing surviving keeps them from having to confront Evan’s growing feelings.
That is until they find a home where they can eat, build a fire, and take a bath. For months they settle in a play homemaker. Evan reads to her novels from the past world and they try to make love. It is a challenge at first but Evan is teaching her for a moment to live like it was but that prompts Thea to question.
“It was a waste.” His voice was harsh. “A whole city died because too damn many people lived there. They all wanted things. Another car. Television. Wash-after-one-wearing clothes. Freezers full of food. Everyone wanted that.” He stopped long enough to finish the brandy in the glass and pour more. “It wasn’t their fault, though it wasn’t. No one told them the truth.No. Not the truth Truth. Truth.” He wagged a finger at her – “Doesn’t win elections. Or sell papers Truth isn’t popular. So they died. Suddenly he stopped. So we’re like goths living in the ruins. The dark ages comes again.”
In the very end, there is still no hope but Evan and Thea find love and are willing to stay together. It makes for a nice romance surrounded by this super bleak novel. False Dawn is incredible, up there with the most powerful of post-apocalypse novels. A real gem of ecological horror and Speculative warning. We should be happy this world never came to be but Yarbo does an amazing job painting a dark classic. I loved it.
...more
Notes are private!
1
Jun 19, 2023
Jun 23, 2023
Jan 17, 2022
Paperback
3.66
9,510
1967
Nov 14, 2017
it was amazing
There are some books that are classics of the Science Fiction genre that transcend the era they were written in and feel timeless. Amazing works of fi
There are some books that are classics of the Science Fiction genre that transcend the era they were written in and feel timeless. Amazing works of fiction retain all the power they were written with even as decades passed. Often they are ones that are respected beyond the genre ghetto. For me I Am Legend, The Dispossessed come to mind. The last book like this I discovered was Canticle for Leibowitz. A book that is respected beyond the genre, but undeniably Science Fiction. Add Ice by Anna Kavan to that shortlist. Beyond the fact that it has a penguin Classics edition, it has had many editions that have gotten forwards from Sci-fi Royalty like Brian Aldiss now Jonathan Letham who has feet in both literary worlds but capped with an excellent afterword by Kate Zambreno who is not a genre writer.
Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901, to wealthy expatriate British parents. Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson. Her life was a bit of tortured existence, suffering from Heroin addiction and being in and out of mental hospitals. I first read about her challenging life in the pages of Dangerous Visions and New Worlds. I immediately put a hold on it at the library, which delivered this excellent 50th-anniversary edition with the very good Fore and Afterword.
For me reading Ice was like the literary equivalent of a well-structured and brutal death metal song. The power of the prose left me feeling breathless and nodding my head constantly in approval. I can’t speak to Kavaan/ Ferguson's other novels but it is my understanding that this is alone work of the genre, but not the lone work of genius. Being alone work of genre is another thing it has in common with Lebowitz.
The story of a weird apocalypse is at times almost surreal. A supernatural cold is slowly creeping across the landscape entombing the earth in a sheet of thick ice. We are told this story by a nameless narrator who goes on a hero’s quest across this cold and dying landscape in an attempt to save the “Glass girl” a blue-eyed super goth lilly white-skinned woman who is on the cover of this edition. His motivation is simply to save her from the fate of being enslaved by The Warden.
The prose is wonderful. Powerful and clean, the beauty and horror are woven together like the threads in a basket, one that carries a grim world…
“Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all around. Closer, the trees around the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armor.”
There were pages and pages throughout the short but powerful novel that I stopped and read multiple times. As our unnamed point of view character travels the world, we see more misery and destruction. There is a tight balance between story and vibe. The tone overpowers the story at times but to me that made perfect sense as mirrored the slow creep of the ice.
The novel does an excellent job of balancing the weird with the uncomfortable reality that gives the novel a feeling of creeping horror. Dead silence, white peace.
“It seemed to me we were fighting against the ice, which was all the while coming steadily nearer, covering more of the world with its dead silence, its awful white peace. By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe.”
Unlike any novel about the end of the world, Ice has a feeling of creeping misery and depression that would be a natural thing to feel. I have read stories that captured that feel, but it is rare to stretch that feeling over a complete novel.
“As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.”
At the same time, the mechanics of the adventure never fall to the wayside, and using beautiful and heartbreaking to tell action is a magic trick that Ice performs over and over…
“In the deepening dusk every horror could be expected. She was afraid to look, tried not to see the spectral shapes rising from the water, but felt them come gliding toward her and fled in panic. One overtook her, would her in soft, clammy, adhesive bands like ectoplasm.”
To say this novel is unique is a terrible understatement. The themes the novel explores are vast and deep. From isolation, disconnection with society, climate change, feminism, and fascism. It is all tied together with some of the best and most elaborate prose. It has both moments of epic almost cosmic level terror that hit like a sledgehammer and moments of world-building that are surgical and exact. It is the reason this review is almost more quotes than me writing about it. Nothing I can say can sell this novel better than the beautifully dark prose.
At the same time, the parallel to our world is strong, but it is the reversal that makes it haunting. Each year the forest fires rage, the heat waves kill more and the shoreline creeps up higher. Ice presents an end that is as cold has her relationship to the world and presents us with a catalog of what-ifs. Do we live with the creep or do we see through it as it spreads….
“I realized that the destruction must have been on a gigantic scale. Little could have survived. The local broadcasters were cheerfully reassuring. It was official policy, the population had to be kept calm. But these men actually seemed to believe their country was safe, no matter how far removed from the present devastation, which would spread and spread…”
...more
Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901, to wealthy expatriate British parents. Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson. Her life was a bit of tortured existence, suffering from Heroin addiction and being in and out of mental hospitals. I first read about her challenging life in the pages of Dangerous Visions and New Worlds. I immediately put a hold on it at the library, which delivered this excellent 50th-anniversary edition with the very good Fore and Afterword.
For me reading Ice was like the literary equivalent of a well-structured and brutal death metal song. The power of the prose left me feeling breathless and nodding my head constantly in approval. I can’t speak to Kavaan/ Ferguson's other novels but it is my understanding that this is alone work of the genre, but not the lone work of genius. Being alone work of genre is another thing it has in common with Lebowitz.
The story of a weird apocalypse is at times almost surreal. A supernatural cold is slowly creeping across the landscape entombing the earth in a sheet of thick ice. We are told this story by a nameless narrator who goes on a hero’s quest across this cold and dying landscape in an attempt to save the “Glass girl” a blue-eyed super goth lilly white-skinned woman who is on the cover of this edition. His motivation is simply to save her from the fate of being enslaved by The Warden.
The prose is wonderful. Powerful and clean, the beauty and horror are woven together like the threads in a basket, one that carries a grim world…
“Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all around. Closer, the trees around the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armor.”
There were pages and pages throughout the short but powerful novel that I stopped and read multiple times. As our unnamed point of view character travels the world, we see more misery and destruction. There is a tight balance between story and vibe. The tone overpowers the story at times but to me that made perfect sense as mirrored the slow creep of the ice.
The novel does an excellent job of balancing the weird with the uncomfortable reality that gives the novel a feeling of creeping horror. Dead silence, white peace.
“It seemed to me we were fighting against the ice, which was all the while coming steadily nearer, covering more of the world with its dead silence, its awful white peace. By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe.”
Unlike any novel about the end of the world, Ice has a feeling of creeping misery and depression that would be a natural thing to feel. I have read stories that captured that feel, but it is rare to stretch that feeling over a complete novel.
“As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.”
At the same time, the mechanics of the adventure never fall to the wayside, and using beautiful and heartbreaking to tell action is a magic trick that Ice performs over and over…
“In the deepening dusk every horror could be expected. She was afraid to look, tried not to see the spectral shapes rising from the water, but felt them come gliding toward her and fled in panic. One overtook her, would her in soft, clammy, adhesive bands like ectoplasm.”
To say this novel is unique is a terrible understatement. The themes the novel explores are vast and deep. From isolation, disconnection with society, climate change, feminism, and fascism. It is all tied together with some of the best and most elaborate prose. It has both moments of epic almost cosmic level terror that hit like a sledgehammer and moments of world-building that are surgical and exact. It is the reason this review is almost more quotes than me writing about it. Nothing I can say can sell this novel better than the beautifully dark prose.
At the same time, the parallel to our world is strong, but it is the reversal that makes it haunting. Each year the forest fires rage, the heat waves kill more and the shoreline creeps up higher. Ice presents an end that is as cold has her relationship to the world and presents us with a catalog of what-ifs. Do we live with the creep or do we see through it as it spreads….
“I realized that the destruction must have been on a gigantic scale. Little could have survived. The local broadcasters were cheerfully reassuring. It was official policy, the population had to be kept calm. But these men actually seemed to believe their country was safe, no matter how far removed from the present devastation, which would spread and spread…”
...more
Notes are private!
1
Mar 07, 2022
Mar 09, 2022
Jan 12, 2022
Paperback
1250782953
9781250782953
1250782953
3.29
1,823
Jan 25, 2022
Jan 25, 2022
it was amazing
Why do you read Science Fiction? What is it that really draws you in? I could list many things that attract me. When I was a super young reader I was
Why do you read Science Fiction? What is it that really draws you in? I could list many things that attract me. When I was a super young reader I was here for the spaceships, as an adult, my favorite thing in speculative fiction is the political stuff that challenges society. That is one reason why my favorite era of SF in the 20th century is from the New Wave on. As that is when the genre really began to challenge everything. That is the key to this book CHALLENGE EVERYTHING.
This is my first-time reading Tochi Onyebuchi and I was more than just impressed, this is a masterwork of speculative (rightfully) angry activism that is equally literature. If you are going to read this book there are a few facts you are going to have to accept. This is opinionated fiction, that is meant to challenge the reader not only with a message but in narrative form. The narrative has a throw you in the deep end feel to it. The story is not told in a direct timeline, the structure of the narrative completely changes in the third part which is a major stylistic change for almost a hundred pages. Despite the radical change in form, this part of the book is the beating heart of the story. The narrative also doesn't hold your hand, it is abstract at times and always requires a mind willing to think deeply about the text. There are times that the story might be confusing for some readers. Not me, but some readers.
The challenges go even deeper. I laughed when I saw a list of trigger warnings for this book in a review. It is not that these things are funny but in a speculative fiction novel that highlights where systematic racism/ Classism collides with global climate and environmental disaster things will get ugly. As Fishbone would say U-G-L-Y Goliath ain't got no alibi. So trigger warnings will include references to rape; graphic instances of drug use; lots of murder, and death; racism, and racial slurs; references to lynching and suicide; descriptions of police brutality, incarceration, gun violence, and a whole bunch of violence in general. How about this, Tochi is keeping it very very real.
There is nothing soft, gentle, or politically sensitive about this novel. Which is kind of a pleasant (from my perspective) divergence from much of modern fiction that at times is afraid to push boundaries. I think the reaction will be interesting as it is a very progressive story politically, but the delivery is zero fucks given warts and all depiction of the post-climate world. Of course, the future TO envisions is one where most of the wealthy have escaped earth to orbital colonies while the marginalized struggle to survive in our mutual home.
I consider this book a masterpiece that has shades of one of my favorite novels of all time John Brunner's 1969 Hugo award-winning Stand on Zanzibar. I thought this book was so damn good that I was curious and looked up a few bad reviews just to see what the negative peeps were saying. TO did lose a fair amount of readers in the first act because people were lost with the slice of life all over the place nature of that first act. This to me was an effective tactic for giving a wide picture of this world. I don't mind being confused as long as the writing is good and interesting moments are involved along the way. It provided excellent moments like...
“The bedsheets chilled their bodies with sweat-soak, rumpled beneath them. They lay side by side, David and Jonathan, and, behind their blindfolds, they traced the arc their drones made over the earth. Lux levels rose in golden bars just outside their vision as the drones dipped through clouds cover and flew past domed cityscapes. Chicago glowed through a blanket of clouds. The drones swooped upward and dwarf galaxies turned from cosmic smudges into multihued ninja shurikens.”
This is not only great prose but excellent world-building where we get a view of the have and have nots. The idea that the wealthy colony folk monitor the earth and wistfully watch the planet they left doesn't drive the story forward but it builds the world. In the moment that will sail past many readers. I wasn't sure at the moment what it meant but I was curious. I am not sure why everyone wants to understand everything right away.
John Brunner in 1969 used a similar tactic of storytelling wise, not confining the story to one point of view, and giving a wide scope of points of view. Goliath does this in way fewer pages. Both books separated by half a century share themes and methods, but of course, the points of view of the authors are radically different. It is funny to see come of the same negative comments too. Not me both books are masterpieces and value radically different takes on the same general idea. Sadly SOZ is hailed now as prophetic for predicting school shootings and reality TV to name just two things, we can only hope Goliath is warning we need, and we avoid this future.
The message as I saw it move from the page into my eyes and straight to my heart was clear. This novel is about the intersection between Racism/Classism and the growing climate change apocalypse. That was Brunner's message as well, but TO's window into it is fresh and vital in a way a book by a radical white Brit in 1968 just can't do anymore no matter how amazing it still is.
“Had nothing to do with the type of life I lived beforehand. Because I think everybody comes to prison, deep down, wanting that. Or at least some version of that. Who comes to prison wantin’ to be turned into an animal?”
During that third part, the book takes on a historical feel. Based on some real events but pushed into the future and fictionalized this part is inspired by the Attica prison riots. It was at this point that I thought I was detecting the wavelength this book was putting out. There is no greater example of the dehumanization of modern racism than the modern prison industrial complex, something I know far too well as I experienced it as an activist. There are many punishments involved in the imprisonment system but the lack of dignity is the root of so much and this novel expresses that very well. There is no way to write about prison without admitting its dark nature of it. The masks come off, racism is open, the class strata of who is fully given human dignity and who is not is open and on the surface so to me this was a really great choice.
How about an example...
“…Your population of guards is pulling from the rural South Carolina job Market? Lotta poor white people bein’ eft behind while the planet’s getting’ warmer and the rich folk are fucking off to space. A lot of the bad stuff white did to Black folk, they did to these kids. Some of these kids came in beyond hope. They watched their parents get spied on by police and picked up in unmarked vans. Had their first taste of first-gen toasters. They just knew how the whole system was. They knew and didn’t give a fuck. I think it just made them more likely to blow the whole place up. Ain’t no cage for their kind of angry.”
This is already a reality of the prison COs and the inherent problems in the system but TO extrapolates this into his speculative future perfection. The first generation toasters are AI mech fighters who alongside drones take high-tech police repression to support the ruling elite of this future. The prisons are full of frontline rednecks but the system is supported by technology.
So is the mission statement of this novel this simple...
“And that is how it started. That’s how…all this got started. The red dust storms, the radiation, the fallout, the war, The Exodusters. All of it.”
A short but powerful moment, but nearly every page of the book contains powerful statements. It is a book that might not be understood when you first go through it. As I started this review I kept talking about the challenge of it. A brutal and literary David Versus Goliath re-mix that never flinches anyway from the hard is what the genre needed this year. Give Goliath all the awards next year at least nominate it for everything. This is as vital a new sci-fi book as I have read in years. Maybe since Carrie Vaughn's Bannerless, or Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland.
The thing is TO has such a powerful voice, singular in tone, training, and writing ability this book is a miracle of awesomeness I have to celebrate. I am dying to have the author on my podcast, to break down this amazing work. I will have to read Riot Baby, but this book feels like an author unleashed. Even though it is my first time reading him. So more than anything I can't wait till the next one. ...more
This is my first-time reading Tochi Onyebuchi and I was more than just impressed, this is a masterwork of speculative (rightfully) angry activism that is equally literature. If you are going to read this book there are a few facts you are going to have to accept. This is opinionated fiction, that is meant to challenge the reader not only with a message but in narrative form. The narrative has a throw you in the deep end feel to it. The story is not told in a direct timeline, the structure of the narrative completely changes in the third part which is a major stylistic change for almost a hundred pages. Despite the radical change in form, this part of the book is the beating heart of the story. The narrative also doesn't hold your hand, it is abstract at times and always requires a mind willing to think deeply about the text. There are times that the story might be confusing for some readers. Not me, but some readers.
The challenges go even deeper. I laughed when I saw a list of trigger warnings for this book in a review. It is not that these things are funny but in a speculative fiction novel that highlights where systematic racism/ Classism collides with global climate and environmental disaster things will get ugly. As Fishbone would say U-G-L-Y Goliath ain't got no alibi. So trigger warnings will include references to rape; graphic instances of drug use; lots of murder, and death; racism, and racial slurs; references to lynching and suicide; descriptions of police brutality, incarceration, gun violence, and a whole bunch of violence in general. How about this, Tochi is keeping it very very real.
There is nothing soft, gentle, or politically sensitive about this novel. Which is kind of a pleasant (from my perspective) divergence from much of modern fiction that at times is afraid to push boundaries. I think the reaction will be interesting as it is a very progressive story politically, but the delivery is zero fucks given warts and all depiction of the post-climate world. Of course, the future TO envisions is one where most of the wealthy have escaped earth to orbital colonies while the marginalized struggle to survive in our mutual home.
I consider this book a masterpiece that has shades of one of my favorite novels of all time John Brunner's 1969 Hugo award-winning Stand on Zanzibar. I thought this book was so damn good that I was curious and looked up a few bad reviews just to see what the negative peeps were saying. TO did lose a fair amount of readers in the first act because people were lost with the slice of life all over the place nature of that first act. This to me was an effective tactic for giving a wide picture of this world. I don't mind being confused as long as the writing is good and interesting moments are involved along the way. It provided excellent moments like...
“The bedsheets chilled their bodies with sweat-soak, rumpled beneath them. They lay side by side, David and Jonathan, and, behind their blindfolds, they traced the arc their drones made over the earth. Lux levels rose in golden bars just outside their vision as the drones dipped through clouds cover and flew past domed cityscapes. Chicago glowed through a blanket of clouds. The drones swooped upward and dwarf galaxies turned from cosmic smudges into multihued ninja shurikens.”
This is not only great prose but excellent world-building where we get a view of the have and have nots. The idea that the wealthy colony folk monitor the earth and wistfully watch the planet they left doesn't drive the story forward but it builds the world. In the moment that will sail past many readers. I wasn't sure at the moment what it meant but I was curious. I am not sure why everyone wants to understand everything right away.
John Brunner in 1969 used a similar tactic of storytelling wise, not confining the story to one point of view, and giving a wide scope of points of view. Goliath does this in way fewer pages. Both books separated by half a century share themes and methods, but of course, the points of view of the authors are radically different. It is funny to see come of the same negative comments too. Not me both books are masterpieces and value radically different takes on the same general idea. Sadly SOZ is hailed now as prophetic for predicting school shootings and reality TV to name just two things, we can only hope Goliath is warning we need, and we avoid this future.
The message as I saw it move from the page into my eyes and straight to my heart was clear. This novel is about the intersection between Racism/Classism and the growing climate change apocalypse. That was Brunner's message as well, but TO's window into it is fresh and vital in a way a book by a radical white Brit in 1968 just can't do anymore no matter how amazing it still is.
“Had nothing to do with the type of life I lived beforehand. Because I think everybody comes to prison, deep down, wanting that. Or at least some version of that. Who comes to prison wantin’ to be turned into an animal?”
During that third part, the book takes on a historical feel. Based on some real events but pushed into the future and fictionalized this part is inspired by the Attica prison riots. It was at this point that I thought I was detecting the wavelength this book was putting out. There is no greater example of the dehumanization of modern racism than the modern prison industrial complex, something I know far too well as I experienced it as an activist. There are many punishments involved in the imprisonment system but the lack of dignity is the root of so much and this novel expresses that very well. There is no way to write about prison without admitting its dark nature of it. The masks come off, racism is open, the class strata of who is fully given human dignity and who is not is open and on the surface so to me this was a really great choice.
How about an example...
“…Your population of guards is pulling from the rural South Carolina job Market? Lotta poor white people bein’ eft behind while the planet’s getting’ warmer and the rich folk are fucking off to space. A lot of the bad stuff white did to Black folk, they did to these kids. Some of these kids came in beyond hope. They watched their parents get spied on by police and picked up in unmarked vans. Had their first taste of first-gen toasters. They just knew how the whole system was. They knew and didn’t give a fuck. I think it just made them more likely to blow the whole place up. Ain’t no cage for their kind of angry.”
This is already a reality of the prison COs and the inherent problems in the system but TO extrapolates this into his speculative future perfection. The first generation toasters are AI mech fighters who alongside drones take high-tech police repression to support the ruling elite of this future. The prisons are full of frontline rednecks but the system is supported by technology.
So is the mission statement of this novel this simple...
“And that is how it started. That’s how…all this got started. The red dust storms, the radiation, the fallout, the war, The Exodusters. All of it.”
A short but powerful moment, but nearly every page of the book contains powerful statements. It is a book that might not be understood when you first go through it. As I started this review I kept talking about the challenge of it. A brutal and literary David Versus Goliath re-mix that never flinches anyway from the hard is what the genre needed this year. Give Goliath all the awards next year at least nominate it for everything. This is as vital a new sci-fi book as I have read in years. Maybe since Carrie Vaughn's Bannerless, or Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland.
The thing is TO has such a powerful voice, singular in tone, training, and writing ability this book is a miracle of awesomeness I have to celebrate. I am dying to have the author on my podcast, to break down this amazing work. I will have to read Riot Baby, but this book feels like an author unleashed. Even though it is my first time reading him. So more than anything I can't wait till the next one. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Mar 26, 2022
Apr 03, 2022
Dec 16, 2021
Hardcover
1770415939
9781770415935
1770415939
3.71
2,394
Sep 28, 2021
Sep 28, 2021
liked it
There are many reasons that this book should have been right up my alley, and I wanted to like it more than I did. I am generally positive about it an
There are many reasons that this book should have been right up my alley, and I wanted to like it more than I did. I am generally positive about it and very clear that my problems with it may be personal and might not affect you as a reader. So, to open up this review I want to say you should check this book out.
Premee Mohamed is an author I have had my eye on to check out. I knew she wrote about climate themes, and as a believer in Cli-Fi, I generally want to check out all that I can. Her novel Beneath the Rising sounds great, and one that was on the radar. Judging from the length and genre I kind of assumed this was in the Tor novella series. I thought a shorter work was a better place to start.
It appears this is published by some sort of Canadian grant, makes sense it is a Canadian author with a post-climate apocalypse setting of Alberta. The setting and world-building are excellently done, within the first few pages we know society has mostly collapsed except a few domed pockets. Our main narrative point of view is Reid who is accepted to university. It would mean leaving her family who struggles to survive. Scouting parties for water and constant misery are a part of life and Reid doesn’t feel right about leaving her family. The description of the environment is done with style.
“In silent agreement, we squeeze into the window to study our valley. Unlovely in the early spring, crusted with think rime of muddy snow, the river still choked with ice, a single dark thread of water at it’s center. Sleeping tangle of grey saplings, dead shrubs of sepia or amber or faded dogwood red. Brown sparrows and dust-colored pigeons. The only real color is magpipes, repeated shouts of iridescence, irritatingly clean in their black and white suits. Like photographs of actors or spies. How do they stay so clean in this crap, I always wonder.”
The story really gets interesting with the introduction of The cad. It is a fungal infection that is more than just a disease it also alters the mind.
“And people protested. They protested the bans and they protested and they protested the Cad and they mobbed anyone with tattoos of leaves or ferns or cephalopods. No one realized that the infection was cryptic, then dormat, then heritable from either parent. And so it spread, named and considered an epidemic at first- a flash in the pan, like Ebola or Zika or Covid, that would eventually burn-out – and near the end more or less endemic.”
For me, some of the moments that hit me the hardest were the ones that hit close to home. As someone who has been warning about climate change as an activist since 1994…
“It was not instantaneous, the “end of the world,” the way it is in nightmares. The sky didn’t tear open around an asteroid, the earth didn’t swallow us up. And of course the world didn’t end the same for everyone.”
These warnings in the novel made for very powerful moments.
“On a human scale it was slow enough that for a long time it didn’t even seem truly dire; on a geological scale it seemed that nothing was happening, till suddenly the feedback cycles tipped over, became too front-heavy to regulate themselves.”
All this is good stuff. Overall I enjoyed the book for the first half I was thinking very highly. In the second half, there were a couple of chapters devoted to characters hunting. The vegan, animal liberationist in me could ignore a little bit of this but I felt it went on too long and slowed the narrative down. Again this might not bother you as a reader. Also, I was curious about the university and the domes. Those places and settings we never got to explore.
Overall the best compliment I can give this short novel is that it made me more interested in the author’s other work. Even if I didn’t love this novel, I can see lots of stuff I do like. I would also recommend it to most Sci-fi/CLI-FI readers. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Mar 03, 2022
Mar 06, 2022
Nov 08, 2021
Paperback
0374173540
9780374173548
0374173540
3.25
10,494
Apr 06, 2021
Apr 06, 2021
really liked it
One of the coolest things about the popularity of Jeff Vandermeer is that he built a readership despite writing books as strange as the Southern Reach
One of the coolest things about the popularity of Jeff Vandermeer is that he built a readership despite writing books as strange as the Southern Reach trilogy and last year’s Dead Astronauts. While Annihilation had the benefit of a movie starring Natalie Portman, it is cool that an author known for thoughtful surreal politically aware eco-science fiction has a following. That all being said despite the title Hummingbird Salamander is Vandermeer’s most commercial and approachable book yet. Don’t misunderstand me it is plenty weird. As an unofficial vanguard of the new weird his is always an important voice even if the work is more grounded than we are used to.
One of the things that grounds the book a bit is its ‘Ten seconds in the future’ vibe and the very solidly likely climate disaster expressed in mostly subtle world-building. This was done with a surgical touch, not a hammer. There are a few paragraphs of exposition but done tastefully enough that they don’t feel like info-dumps. As an ecological alarmist who is also an activist and cli-fi writer myself I course could relate to those moments. Early on in the book, Vandermeer established a near future with multiple hotbed disasters happening everywhere.
I am not sure the average reader with relate to Jane Smith as the main character but I did. Take for example this powerful moment when the mystery at the heart of the novel starts to drive Jane and her husband apart.
“Here a woman could worry about her husband cheating on her while just two hundred miles inland there was a mass exodus of disaster refugees headed north to a Canada that might take them in. A “sanctuary” where aquifers and other water sources were drying up. In the Midwest, privatized security forces were brawling with protestors in the streets of small towns. Disease outbreaks had lead to mass slaughter of affected livestock. While stocks remained bullish about the future even as the window for reversing climate change had shrunk to an unreachable dot.”
I could relate to Jane Smith because for a long time I have struggled with the unshakable awareness of climate insanity and the attempt to live a balanced life despite the feeling of being like a lobster in a pot coming to a slow boil. At the heart of this story is Jane a security expert who has gifted her a key to a storage locker inside is a stuffed hummingbird from a well know radical environmentalist Silvina. The answer to this mystery is not as weird or surreal as I expected, but the journey is compelling.
The hummingbird is a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin. Jane becomes obsessed with Silvina and the mystery, it destroys her peace, her family and sends her around the globe for answers. In many ways, this is like an ecological Bond story. The story works, and has plenty of exciting twists and turns but for me, the book’s most interesting moments were the ways Vandermeer used the framework to discuss ideas.
Hidden between fight scenes and classic spy thriller excitement was an investigation that breaks down the life and death of eco-radical. The story tests the strength of Jane as she is tested by the ecological collapse which challenges her own ethics and sense of right or wrong. Vandermeer slips in moments of beautiful eco-philosophical ideas. Like this well crafted aside on the idea of progress…
“Progress’:a word to choke on, a word to discard and then pick up again, hurl it in the oven like coal, watch it spurl out its own name in black smoke from the chimney of the hunting lodge. I embrace it, and I repeat it, and yet I know no word I or any other human could use will ever be the right word.”
The dying ecology and the balance of nature is the back drop of the mystery, it is the drive of Silvina’s plan. The world needs to be pushed to these limits to inspire the madness, but I can’t be alone in understanding her position. Certainly, Jane Smith comes to believe playing family is meaningless in this future.
The story unfolds as Jane is reading Silvina’s journals, the world only growing darker as the killers and threats zero in on her. The timing of this in the narrative is all excellently paced. Bits and pieces of the plan are revealed as the threat becomes more clear. Silvina was an idealist who tried and failed to make a new way in a commune called Unitopia. This highlights the dilemma for many activists. All this work for change and the danger is only greater for my effort.
“No, in the end, easier to tear it down and start over. The soundless scream of social media these days. The system must be destroyed. It can’t be fixed. Unitopia must have begun to seem like a Band-Aid applied to a gaping chest wound.”
This leads to the darkest moment in the book in my opinion.
"Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories."
We could be and probably are already there at the end. It would be impossible to live in the internet age, certainly after four years of Trump to not see the danger of misinformation. This is a running subtext in the book, one of the coolest aspects of how the narrative unfolds is that we have two unreliable narrators at work here. Both Jane (if that is her name) and Silvina who has a very clear agenda. The science on the climate is there and reliable, but who to believe when humans are.
Cli-fi is a genre but it is nothing new science fiction has been addressing the coming ecological disaster almost as early as the 50s. I known I am a broken record promoting the efforts of British sci-fi master John Brunner, but it is impossible for writers working today to speculate about the future without addressing these issues.
From here on out in this review, I am going to get into themes that involve minor spoilers, I don’t think the experience of this book can be ruined. But to sum it up before getting into the ending I would say this is a book worth reading. It is not as surreal as some of Vandermeer’s earlier work but doesn’t go in thinking that this is like Metallica writing a pop song. Every page drips with the author’s intelligence, creativity, compassion, and unique view of the world. That is what makes Vandermeer and this book special. OK, Spoiler warnings were given…
As for the ending, important things happen that I want to talk about. As a an author of the new weird who wrote one of the greatest modern classics of genre mystery two things happened at the end I was not expecting.
First the end of the world, the progression of this element was darker than I expected but not sure why I didn’t see it coming. I liked that Vandermeer didn’t go overboard on describing or dwelling on this. Jane is mostly out and away from society. There are excellent moments of pure world-building I respected.
“Homeland security still exists?”
“Not by that name. Just their drones. Do you know how many secret drones lacerate the sky these days? They’ll outlast us all. Form their own civilization.”
I think one of the things that seperates Hummingbird Salamander from other books in the Vandermeer canon is there is no hiding the mission statement as I saw it. Maybe I misreading this and I have not read or listened to any interviews that Vandermeer has given. The following statement from the closing pages of the book appears to this reader to be the mission made more clear than I thought we would get.
“I spent some time frozen, arguing with my thoughts.
Derangement or genius? Was it even possible? If I was a right, to create not a deadly pandemic or a biological bomb but a new, true seeing? Let the world in through your pores like a salamander, see all the colors of the flowers only a hummingbird could see.”
Can you see and feel the world like these animals? Can you step outside of your human flesh and connect to the earth and nature a different way? Hummingbird Salamander is asking you to do that, and that is why it is a powerful book. ...more
One of the things that grounds the book a bit is its ‘Ten seconds in the future’ vibe and the very solidly likely climate disaster expressed in mostly subtle world-building. This was done with a surgical touch, not a hammer. There are a few paragraphs of exposition but done tastefully enough that they don’t feel like info-dumps. As an ecological alarmist who is also an activist and cli-fi writer myself I course could relate to those moments. Early on in the book, Vandermeer established a near future with multiple hotbed disasters happening everywhere.
I am not sure the average reader with relate to Jane Smith as the main character but I did. Take for example this powerful moment when the mystery at the heart of the novel starts to drive Jane and her husband apart.
“Here a woman could worry about her husband cheating on her while just two hundred miles inland there was a mass exodus of disaster refugees headed north to a Canada that might take them in. A “sanctuary” where aquifers and other water sources were drying up. In the Midwest, privatized security forces were brawling with protestors in the streets of small towns. Disease outbreaks had lead to mass slaughter of affected livestock. While stocks remained bullish about the future even as the window for reversing climate change had shrunk to an unreachable dot.”
I could relate to Jane Smith because for a long time I have struggled with the unshakable awareness of climate insanity and the attempt to live a balanced life despite the feeling of being like a lobster in a pot coming to a slow boil. At the heart of this story is Jane a security expert who has gifted her a key to a storage locker inside is a stuffed hummingbird from a well know radical environmentalist Silvina. The answer to this mystery is not as weird or surreal as I expected, but the journey is compelling.
The hummingbird is a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin. Jane becomes obsessed with Silvina and the mystery, it destroys her peace, her family and sends her around the globe for answers. In many ways, this is like an ecological Bond story. The story works, and has plenty of exciting twists and turns but for me, the book’s most interesting moments were the ways Vandermeer used the framework to discuss ideas.
Hidden between fight scenes and classic spy thriller excitement was an investigation that breaks down the life and death of eco-radical. The story tests the strength of Jane as she is tested by the ecological collapse which challenges her own ethics and sense of right or wrong. Vandermeer slips in moments of beautiful eco-philosophical ideas. Like this well crafted aside on the idea of progress…
“Progress’:a word to choke on, a word to discard and then pick up again, hurl it in the oven like coal, watch it spurl out its own name in black smoke from the chimney of the hunting lodge. I embrace it, and I repeat it, and yet I know no word I or any other human could use will ever be the right word.”
The dying ecology and the balance of nature is the back drop of the mystery, it is the drive of Silvina’s plan. The world needs to be pushed to these limits to inspire the madness, but I can’t be alone in understanding her position. Certainly, Jane Smith comes to believe playing family is meaningless in this future.
The story unfolds as Jane is reading Silvina’s journals, the world only growing darker as the killers and threats zero in on her. The timing of this in the narrative is all excellently paced. Bits and pieces of the plan are revealed as the threat becomes more clear. Silvina was an idealist who tried and failed to make a new way in a commune called Unitopia. This highlights the dilemma for many activists. All this work for change and the danger is only greater for my effort.
“No, in the end, easier to tear it down and start over. The soundless scream of social media these days. The system must be destroyed. It can’t be fixed. Unitopia must have begun to seem like a Band-Aid applied to a gaping chest wound.”
This leads to the darkest moment in the book in my opinion.
"Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories."
We could be and probably are already there at the end. It would be impossible to live in the internet age, certainly after four years of Trump to not see the danger of misinformation. This is a running subtext in the book, one of the coolest aspects of how the narrative unfolds is that we have two unreliable narrators at work here. Both Jane (if that is her name) and Silvina who has a very clear agenda. The science on the climate is there and reliable, but who to believe when humans are.
Cli-fi is a genre but it is nothing new science fiction has been addressing the coming ecological disaster almost as early as the 50s. I known I am a broken record promoting the efforts of British sci-fi master John Brunner, but it is impossible for writers working today to speculate about the future without addressing these issues.
From here on out in this review, I am going to get into themes that involve minor spoilers, I don’t think the experience of this book can be ruined. But to sum it up before getting into the ending I would say this is a book worth reading. It is not as surreal as some of Vandermeer’s earlier work but doesn’t go in thinking that this is like Metallica writing a pop song. Every page drips with the author’s intelligence, creativity, compassion, and unique view of the world. That is what makes Vandermeer and this book special. OK, Spoiler warnings were given…
As for the ending, important things happen that I want to talk about. As a an author of the new weird who wrote one of the greatest modern classics of genre mystery two things happened at the end I was not expecting.
First the end of the world, the progression of this element was darker than I expected but not sure why I didn’t see it coming. I liked that Vandermeer didn’t go overboard on describing or dwelling on this. Jane is mostly out and away from society. There are excellent moments of pure world-building I respected.
“Homeland security still exists?”
“Not by that name. Just their drones. Do you know how many secret drones lacerate the sky these days? They’ll outlast us all. Form their own civilization.”
I think one of the things that seperates Hummingbird Salamander from other books in the Vandermeer canon is there is no hiding the mission statement as I saw it. Maybe I misreading this and I have not read or listened to any interviews that Vandermeer has given. The following statement from the closing pages of the book appears to this reader to be the mission made more clear than I thought we would get.
“I spent some time frozen, arguing with my thoughts.
Derangement or genius? Was it even possible? If I was a right, to create not a deadly pandemic or a biological bomb but a new, true seeing? Let the world in through your pores like a salamander, see all the colors of the flowers only a hummingbird could see.”
Can you see and feel the world like these animals? Can you step outside of your human flesh and connect to the earth and nature a different way? Hummingbird Salamander is asking you to do that, and that is why it is a powerful book. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Jun 07, 2021
Jun 13, 2021
Jun 07, 2021
Hardcover
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