Walking on the Moon

Every couple years I like to check in on Stephen Dobyns. He seems to have made himself a nice career writing interesting crime fiction, including at least one mystery series. Not surprising given that his debut, The Church of Dead Girls fits into that broad category. Girls impressed me with what it hangs off that structure and he generally has something up his sleeve.

Which brings me to Is Fat Bob Dead Yet? It starts off as a crime drama/mystery in the style of Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen. Splashy murder, bombastic characters, lots of organized crime vibes. A good time. But at some point Dobyns starts talking directly to his reader in a way that is more conversational. It’s a nice bit of writing. I mean there was a narrator there the whole time, but there’s a slow shift that imbues that narrator with some character that draws attention to the fact that the reader is being told a story.

Dobyns manages an interesting balance of that metafictive storytelling and entertaining potboiler. I’m not blown away by either side of the approach, but I can’t complain either. The characters are engaging and I wanted to see how it all turned out.

Recommended.

I am a huge fan of A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the book that establishes the world of A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. I definitely was excited to see how Becky Chambers built on that phenomenal start.

Crown-Shy takes us farther into the world and fills in more of how a society of sentients who are completely violence-blind works. The society is also cooperative at its root, which provides some interesting ideas on the economics. Even more interesting is how family dynamics evolve in such a world. It’s all interesting but I felt less of the awe of discovery.

I tend not to talk about plot details and characters in when I discuss these books, but that’s not because they’re dull. This is a fun read with interesting characters and dramatic tension. I want to keep turning the pages and follow the twists in the road. But in the long term I find the world chewier.

Strongly Recommended.

Looking over my reviews of The Time Machine and The Invisible Man I see that I touted how Wells’s social commentary was flavored by his times, but not overwhelmed by it. I can’t really say the same for Moreau. It’s really about very turn of the 20th century ideas about evolution, savagery, and humanity.

Maybe check out one of those other ones.

This is the second book of Corey White’s trilogy that started with Killing Gravity. It continues to deliver on a well-tuned space opera. I had been away from the characters for several years and fell right into the narrative. I read both Void Black Shadow and Static Ruin back to back. Since I’m not digging too deeply into plot, I’m covering about both here.

I like that though White is clearly writing a space opera, he’s not writing in a world without logic. His evil galactic empire isn’t shaky enough to put all its eggs into one Death Star. And it’s also populated with the sort of punch-the-clock evildoers who wind up working for evil in the real world.

It’s also a world with consequences. While White and his protagonist, Mars, may understand how you wind up as a file clerk for the Empire, they neither excuse or forgive temptation into more nefarious vocations. There’s a “break in to Devil’s Island to break our guy out” trope in here that runs aground on the kinds of terror that runs amok in such places. Those responsible are neither excused nor forgiven, but Mars gets her scars, too.

Evil’s not incompetent either. Mars’s plans do not always go as she expects or as a reader of space opera might expect. Competent foes and real consequences are in play.

I quite like the mix of full-bore planetary-class superpowers and real-world dynamics here. Being able to throw a starship around with your mind has less practical application than one might wish. White brings that home without losing the operatic scope.

The protagonist remains a space witch, though some unpleasant alternatives are put forth as well.

Recommended.

Richard Matheson made his name writing short stories and novellas that looked at genre standards with a modern eye. The unexpected turns those took made them both standards in SF magazines of the day and the basis for many a Twilight Zone episode. I saw a collection at the LAPL and decided to have a look.

The man deserves his reputation. The stories are well crafted and clever. It’s easy to see how these stories both delighted readers and inspired later writers to play with different perspectives on old tropes.

They are a product of their time. I wouldn’t want to be a woman in a Matheson world. While I can be frustrated that a writer who can generate sympathy for the Devil would still have Satan’s wife doing the dishes, I still recognize the craft.

Recommended.

To get ready to write this review, I looked at my previous Irving reviews, and the review of In One Person covers everything I want to say.

I want to underline that John Irving is one of my favorite novelists. I enjoyed reading this novel. If you like John Irving, you will too. But if you don’t know if you like John Irving, I’d probably point you at The Cider House Rules. Or A Prayer for Owen Meany depending what I know about you.

A friend suggested taking a bite of the Silo series, so I read Hugh Howey’s first book, Wool. I confess I was somewhat underwhelmed. It seemed a lot like reading Michael Crichton circa Jurassic Park. The work seemed like the outline for a movie or TV series.

On those terms, it’s pretty good. Howey has a mastery of plot and the clockwork ticks well here. You can see the cliffhangers that would mark advertising breaks, episode transitions, and maybe season caps. I respect the ability to control pace that way. The work of constructing the set-up and pay-offs of those plot beats is considerable and he did it well.

I didn’t get drawn into the characters or setting much, though. He does drop you into a mostly unfamiliar world that seems connected to ours, but exactly how gets slowly and incompletely revealed. Unfortunately, I didn’t fully buy the world as it’s revealed. I feel like I might have been more forgiving if the characters were more fleshed out. They seemed more like sketches.

Again, as a candidate for adaptation, those are opportunities for actors and directors to breathe life into it. Depending on how that happens, the series (Apple TV+ seems to be doing one) could be quite fun.

After I was so blown away by A Psalm for the Wild-Built I decided to go back To Beck Chambers’s Wayfarers series and see if I was missing something. I didn’t re-read The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet but I picked up the next in the series, A Closed and Common Orbit.

Yep, blown away again.

Common is a fun, interesting and engaging piece of SF. It’s a completely character-driven adventure story set in a textured and immersive setting. There’s a compelling theme of how families form even in the absence of biological relationships (or biology at all). It’s all great stuff but what blows me away is how deep and well constructed the whole thing is.

It is an adventure story, but there’s really no MacGuffin or inciting incident related to the adventure. It reads like the plot grows organically from the characters, their revealed history, and their developing relationships. I’m not hedging on the adventure story; this isn’t a story where the only stakes are the emotions of the characters. There are physical risks and consequences. But the characters make the stakes (emotional and physical). And every action they take is utterly believable based on what’s on the pages.

When I take the deeper dive and think about the whys and hows of the story I’m impressed by the intricacy of the character building. SF like Dune is applauded for its world building, but I often find the characters to be subordinate to that world. Chambers builds her setting and characters with the same level of depth and complexity.

It’s also a nice trick to write a book about family where none of the members of that family are capable of procreation. A point that’s never explicitly stated, but is utterly clear on reflection.

I also marvel at the writing. I was worried that I might throw out too many spoilers here because I’d really like to talk about how the characters seem to make much of the plot inevitable in the best ways. Then I tried to explain enough to spoil something and I realized that describing the plot details that show that magic is hard. It’s hard because Chambers has built a complex setting that doesn’t feel complex to me. She doles out just enough exposition to build the relevant world, but it all arrives as things the characters already know. Easy to say and hard to do. The story all felt so natural until I tried to lay it out front to back. Then I realized how many little telling details make the whole setting and plot cohere. It felt like trying to describe a place I’d just lived in for a while to someone who’d never been.

I’ve got a ton more I could say about this book – it’d be a fun book club meeting – but I’ll just mention how much of the book is two episodic, resonant, interleaved timelines that are each exciting in isolation and be done.

A must.

Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash traces American society’s relationship to the poor back to colonial times. She does a great job digging into both the details and long arcs of how America has always been stratified and how that reflects on the folks in each stratum. It’s interesting and important to understand, but I didn’t come away surprised.

It’s well written and well documented. A fine history of an underdocumented angle on American history.

I’ve been on a run of reading SF that I really like. The latest is Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous. This is a book I could comfortably call a thriller, but it shifts its shape and focus throughout. I could also say its using a imaginary technology to examine ideas of consciousness and intelligence and how those are manipulated, or that it’s a using a dystopian near future world to comment on freedom and duty. It’s all of those at once, and Newitz does a remarkable job keeping all those balls in the air.

Some authors use genre fiction to sugar-coat disruptive ideas in a way that some readers see them and some don’t. Newitz isn’t doing that. The book keeps all its themes in focus throughout, but each of them gets their time at the forefront. If you want to read a thriller about drug pirates vs enforcement agents and not think about the nature of corporate capitalism and personal freedom, you’re going to wind up wanting to skip some chapters.

But, see, here’s the problem with that plan. The thriller is still going on and the characters are still living. When the more philosophical ideas are and front and center they’re not alone, just the most well-lit. You can’t skip the chapter where implications about how incentives and addiction blur in academia and corporate life are front and center because it’s also moving the thriller plot and the character development forward as an integrated whole. Not a lot is happening in the side channel, but what is happening there is crucial.

There’s an argument that Autonomous is about multitasking and is telling by showing. But there’s no shortage of takes on about what this book is about. It covers a lot of thematic ground with elan. If that weren’t enough it’s got a jaw-dropping rate of tossing out provocative ideas both central and tangential to the plot. And the world.

In addition to being so structurally sound, their prose is phenomenal. There are many turns of phrase I’ll be keeping. Newitz consistently lights a fuse in one place that bursts into a laugh-out-loud joke or emotional chord a hundred pages later.

A must.