Walking on the Moon

I am a sucker for conspiracy-draws-character-to-the-meaning-of-reality art. I’m willing to die on the hill that conspiracy-draws-character-to-the-meaning-of-reality is a genre based on the number of works that fit the bill that I’ve read.

This is Chesterton’s take on it, set in the early 1900’s. I mention the time, because like so many of these, he draws the reader into the web by using plenty of contemporaneous references that slowly melt into universal tropes. Since I didn’t live in the nineteen aughts, these are historical references to me. I like the feeling that Chesterton was pulling his readers in with pop star references.

Because this kind of book is deliberately twisty to make the reader look at reality differently, I won’t try to explain much of the plot. It’s a good run at the genre and has some nice revelations. I think it’s probably sound enough that it would read and confound modern readers of this era’s fiction.

Recommended.

I was browsing around the library looking for a book and ran in to Craig DiLouie‘s name. He’s a horror author who mailed me a pre-print years ago for no reason I could possibly think of. I mean, this blog has a very select audience. Meaning that a couple people who know me and a ton of bots read it. But I liked Paranoia when he sent it to me so when I saw he was selling books, I picked one up.

Episode Thirteen is a horror story on a reality TV ghostbusting show. It’s told in an epistolary fashion, which basically means it’s a found footage telling. He plays the inter-cast drama, the is-this-real-or-not questions, and the mounting spookiness to keep the tension ratcheted up.

Overall the effect is like popping on a good horror flick on. The characters are all archetypal enough that you can get a handle on them quickly, but have enough breath of life in them that they’re believable. The epistolary method nicely mimics the feeling of a found footage horror movie. And the plot zips along well enough to cover the found footage holes.

Covering the found footage holes is a good test for me in a found footage/epistolary story. There are inherent difficulties to getting your characters to expose themselves through text or film that could reasonably turn up later and still be believable. If the story engages me enough that I don’t fixate on those limitations, the author is in business. And DiLouie is here.

Recommended.

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.