Walking on the Moon

This is a classic Czech SF novel by Karel ?apek, the fellow who coined the term robot. What strikes me most is how satirical it is on multiple scales. It does a fine job skewering individuals right up through nations and companies. It does so less in a structured way of stacking individual flaws into structural flaws – you don’t see nations acting the same way as nationals – and more as just showing the multi-scale irrationality of it all. And it’s a fun snappy read as it goes. I mean, it’s not going to wind up anywhere good, but with more whimsical resignation than call to action.

It was written in the 30’s so a lot of the satire of people and their ethnicities foibles has aged badly. The overall tone goes a long way in making it seem more misguided than nasty to me. The perceived quirks of the English middle class don’t really underlie the follies of humanity as a whole, so I rolled my eyes more than hung my head.

Overall an interesting piece of SF. Recommended.

I’ve read some great books from random recommendations on line. And I’ve read The Pussy Detective. That’s too cheap a shot to pass up but it’s unfair to The Pussy Detective.

The book is billed as a Blacksploitation Sex Magic novel, and it completely delivers on that. It creates a really fun Blacksploitation environment and uses the sex and magic ideas as mysterious elements to talk about the world. It would have been a fun 90’s Vertigo series. But it doesn’t rise beyond a pretty niche genre piece. To be fair, I don’t think that was DuVay Knox’s goal. In print, it overstayed its welcome a bit for me, though I did enjoy the Wash U pokes.

I want to be super clear. This is just a case of a work that I’m not the audience for. Knox builds a well-written unique book here. If you have an inclination to check it out, you’ll get a good ride.

I’ve been reading some Space Operas lately that I liked to varying degrees and for various reasons. These three books are a Space Opera trilogy from John Scalzi. This is what I want from a Space Opera.

This is just fun from start to finish. We open in media res of a mutiny and don’t slow down appreciably for 3 books. The world gets built up around us as an unlikely ruler ascends to the galactic throne and faces an unprecedented threat. We meet the rest of our protagonists and villains while barely catching our breath. It’s a hoot.

There’s just enough meat on the bones to make it serious, both for internal stakes and to spark ideas outside the story. The characters are archetypes animated with a breath of life. They change across the novels in interesting and believable ways. The plot twists are believable and frequent. Like I say, great fun.

In fact, I was having so much fun that I was a book and a half in before I noticed that the usual gender ratio for this kind of story was completely reversed. And, thinking about it, no character had any of their appearance described. Huh. Go figure.

Strongly recommended.

I like the idea of Paperback LA. Los Angeles is a big place and people see it different ways. Susan LaTempa wants to lay some breadcrumbs down for people who want to explore the place through media. Mostly prose though she does also include photo essays and such.

It’s an impossible task. And she knows it, but is willing to take a swing anyway. And like I say, I like the idea. I just think her tastes and mine aren’t quite in line. It was nice to revisit The Sellout again, though.

I’ve been poking at some horror lately, with kind of mixed results. I’m admittedly hard to creep out, especially by writing – though it has happened. The Haunting of Hill House didn’t make me jump, but I couldn’t look away, either. I was drawn to it because Jeffery Cranor on Random Number Generator Horror Podcast Number 9 praised the first paragraph of the novel. When a writer I respect remembers a particular paragraph from a novel, it seems worth a look.

It is a remarkable paragraph, but not just because it’s a sculpted piece of prose. It acts as the keystone that makes the rest of the novel the eerie mystery driven by the characters drawn into Hill House that it is. It sets the tone and rhythms of the environment that these characters are going into. They will make their own rhythms and they will combine into different combinations, but they are all riding that first paragraph’s beats. It basically does the work of the prologue to Church of Dead Girls in one paragraph. Remarkable.

None of that happens without Jackson structuring everything that goes on, and I love seeing that kind of stuff, but she does it so deftly that it only emerges on reflection. While I was reading it, it was a spooky story with interesting characters.

When I read The Turn of the Screw, I found the subtext inaccessible. I found the things left unsaid by Jackson much easier to hear. That may be because she’s writing closer in time than James, but I don’t think so.

Basically I found Haunting gripping, spooky, character driven, and fun to think about.

Strongly recommended.

I really liked this book. It took an interesting hook – Orc in a high fantasy/D&D/WoW world wants to retire from adventuring and open a coffee shop – and delivers the goods.

I realize how much craft it takes to make that happen. Travis Baldree has to put enough of the world on the table to make the idea make sense without distracting the reader from the story of this character doing it. And he knows that a reader picking up this book is going to be able to swallow “gnomish espresso machine” long enough to let the world form up around them and make it all make sense.

And then as that world forms he brings in a set of likeable characters along with some not very likeable ones. None too deep, none too shallow. And in parallel with that Baldree lays out his perfect coffee shop. I mean, I assume he does. Why create a coffee shop in a fantasy setting if it’s not your fantasy coffee shop? (He’s a little too heavy on pastry love and a little light on actual coffee.)

There’s a plot, of course. Bad folks want to advance their agendas and our characters have growing to do. It’s all just enough to give a point to hanging out in this emerging coffee shop and these characters. And I had fun doing that.

Recommended.

Fourteen Days is a collaborative novel set in New York City in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a fair amount of room in the “collaborative novel” category. This one is more Canterbury Tales than “write your buddy into a corner,” but it’s not strictly a framing sequence and a bunch of short stories either.

It is in the genre of a bunch of strangers thrown together who start telling tales to pass the time. But Atwood and Preston do a good job of building a sound structure around it. They don’t hide that the novel is composed of short stories and connective tissue. The structure emerges in how one story seems to set another off or how the characters notice and react to the themes of the stories.

The ambience starts as something like telling stories around a campfire but builds to being more confessional. All the characters are reflected in their stories, but not all are defined by them. Everyone is more fleshed out. Most of the characters who do narrate a foundational event in their lives already seem like the kind of person shaped by the event before they tell the story.

It is a novel. There’s a narrative, the characters grow, and the plot is diverting. But I did feel like it was less focused than a work by a single author or small writing team. I am amazed that it is the coherent work that it is. More than 30 authors collaborated on this. If you told me that you could make a book this good composed of significant passages by Erica Jong and R. L. Stine plus 30 others whose works are equally unlike one another, I would have been very skeptical. A feat by all involved.

Recommended.

Death’s End brings the history that runs through The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest to a close. I’ve read enough SF to say “to a close” is tentative at best, but Cixin does project some finality here. That said, the book does begin by retconning a character into the timeline established in The Dark Forest, so I wouldn’t go etching anything into stone, effective as that might be.

The retcon crack was probably unnecessarily snarky. Cixin definitely wrote these books to explore larger themes and I think his universe building only enhances that. And like his other books, I think he’s playing with more than one theme here.

Death’s End spends time talking about fairy tales and the messages we convey to one another. There are nice ideas here about how much the context of the teller matters and how timeless the values are that are passed along. He also raises some interesting questions about when children’s values are appropriate for adults.

Even without the title, the book doesn’t hide that it wants to talk about death and how people face it. Earlier books were more focused on how a culture faces possible extinction, but Death’s End turns more to the personal. The characters always are making decisions with implications far beyond themselves, but Cixin’s clear that those choices are always made by individuals with individual values.

I can see a reading where The Dark Forest and Death’s End are set up as masculine and feminine world views. I think there’s definitely text to support that, but I don’t agree with binding the viewpoints to genders. I’m sure people will take other sides of that argument.

All of this is wrapped up in a Space Opera that is written well and paced to keep the pages turning.

Overall I find the trilogy worth reading and interesting. I’m still thinking about it and arguing with myself about it.

Strongly Recommended.

This might have more spoilers than usual.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about The Dark Forest since I read it. It follows The Three Body Problem directly. The set up is that the Solar System has to prepare for an invasion by a superior force that will show up in a couple centuries. Forest focuses on a facet of the defense plan that basically empowers 4 selected humans to do anything to defend humanity. Humanity can send people forward in time by hibernating, so these humans can see their plans to fruition. The attackers have access to all Earth actions, but limited understanding of the concept of duplicity.

It’s a set up for a cat-and-mouse thriller and Cixin delivers. There are a lot of twists in the characters’ personal plans and experiences and they held my attention. We get to see how the cultures develop under the threat of future extinction. There are personal struggles and space battles. It’s Cixin doing doing the classic SF thing of turning prosaic big issues into fictional threats to show them to us with fresh eyes. And to show how people react with fresh eyes.

But it gets dark. This is probably one of the three most misanthropic books I’ve ever read.

The rules of the game mean that none of the main characters are going to be paladins, but Cixin is a cold realist. He shows us what people do when they believe they are fighting for the ultimate end. I don’t trust all his physics, but I do believe his depiction of people who believe they are messiahs. And I believe there are many self-appointed messiahs today without an interstellar armada bearing down.

I’m vexed that Cixin seems to stack misogyny on top of misanthropy. None of his potential saviors are women. There are few secondary female characters and all of them are strictly in service of the plot. It seems like one of the four potential saviors might be female, especially given how many women played major roles in the first contact in The Three Body Problem, but nope. I suppose he may be arguing that women would behave better, but I disagree. People are people.

When I discuss misogyny, I’m ignoring the character who exists as an embodiment of one of the potential savior’s imaginary perfect woman. That’s very literal and turns into sexual coercion is a way that disturbed me – and I hope most readers – profoundly. But I don’t think this is blind spot misogyny. I think Cixin is intentionally depicting abuse. I also think he’s being deliberately vague about whether this savior is succumbing to his weaknesses or carrying out a necessary subterfuge to hide his plan from an omniscient opponent. And worse than that, no matter which motivation is real or how they’re mixed, the character still deliberately and methodically harms this woman.

All these saviors’ plans are based on ruthless exploitation of people. Several are charged with Crimes against Humanity when their plans are revealed. But those abstract “acceptable losses” crimes didn’t hit me like the deliberate exploitation of one woman. That’s the point of it.

The themes are dark, but the form is an SF thriller and it’s well done. I think lots of Chandler is dark, too, but they’re great mysteries. And there aren’t many books with an Osama bin-Laden cameo that are blurbed by President Obama.

Strongly recommended.

I’m interested in how writers bringing culture of the day into stories to create verisimilitude can wind up distancing readers from the work as time goes by. When I recently read The Turn of the Screw there were several times that the characters left things unsaid that remained unknown to me because I’m not reading in late 18th Century England. I still got something out of Screw, but I wasn’t creeped out the way I was when I read The Church of Dead Girls. It’s been years since I read that and I still get chills.

I bring that up because Hank Green is very much setting An Absolutely Remarkable Thing in the world of late 2010’s internet fame. I can imagine it being steeped enough in that time to become opaque to readers in time. I hope not. For all immersion in the era, I think Green has a lot to say about fame and communities that form around arcane interests that is independent of mechanism.

He also creates a set of characters that I believe. While it’s tempting to try to make characters here stereotypes or symbols, these all feel unique. He does one of my favorite tricks a good writer can pull off: he writes a character who I think is wrong or crazy, but who I like, who I believe, and who I’m rooting for. Even knowing that it’s probably not going to end well.

I like his writing, and he brings the rhythms of the language of the time to life very well. In the same way I like to imagine that people in the 30’s and 40’s spoke like Raymond Chandler characters, I hope people believe we talked this way in the future.

Strongly Recommended.