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1. Mindscape by Andrea Hairston

I started with this because it was the first book I ordered to arrive, but it was a challenging beginning. I'm glad I read it and I do feel like I stretched my brain in a useful way to try and encompass it, but it was not an easy read and I am not sure I would read it again. The worldbuilding is fascinating -- an energy Barrier has appeared on Earth, separating it into Zones. It can only be breached by seasonally appearing corridors, which collapse and kill you if you carry contraband between them, or by corridors created by the singing of Vermittler, Barrier griots who turn out to be purposefully created human/Barrier hybrids.

So far so cool. But realistic as it is that I don't know any more about what the Barrier is, what it wants, how it got there, etc. by the end of the book than I did at the beginning, it drove me a little bonkers in that "if you put a gun on the mantelpiece in the first chapter someone must fire it" way. I don't want to spoil the ending -- and without reading the rest I don't think the spoilers would even make sense -- but even in the final resolution you don't really get to find out why or how it works, just that it does. Hairston's characters use the term "magical realism" to describe the alogical stuff they're dealing with in real life, not just art, and it fits -- it's got that aesthetic of magic as being unknowable, or at least un-pin-downable, unclassifiable or -verifiable.

I also didn't warm to two of the major protagonists, at least not initially -- Lawanda verges on Mary Sue-ism to me sometimes, in that she's pretty much always right and the only one who can see, say, or act on what ought to be common sense. On the other hand, well, she IS right. And that becomes an increasingly rare and valuable commodity. And Elleni is so consumed by her Vermittler visions and so incapable of articulating the convictions they engender to normal humans in linear language that I get impatient.

On the other hand Celestina is a fascinating portrait -- a saint on the surface, someone with a far more bloody and conflicted history in fact -- even though I wanted far more closure on the question of what it means to be two personalities trapped in a single body -- and more to the point, who "Celestina", as distinct from Robin and Thandiwe, is and where she came from. And "7 Stories" Aaron Dunkelbrot, a self-reinvented filmmaker with more illusions and convictions left from his former life than he realizes, I found compelling as well.

There are at least three couples in this book attempting something between political reeducation of one partner and rapprochement of opposing stances through love/sex -- it's arguable whether any of them succeed, but venereal transmission of raised consciousness is clearly a leit motif.

 
 

2. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

  I adored this book and so have much less to say about it. I normally prefer novels to short story collections but there is not one story in this book that I didn't like very much, and more than one I loved. Chiang likes to play exploded cosmologies out to what their logical conclusions would be if they were actually true, which may appeal to fans of Jay Lake's Mainspring or Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw, but it's perfectly possible to not care about that at all and still love these -- that's the pretext, not the point. Chiang has a knack for capturing a complex and moving emotional reality *and* making you care about the characters and remember them in a surprisingly few words -- the poignancy of the title story along is worth the price of admission (and proof, if any were still needed, that some men can write note-perfect female POV on a quintessentially woman-specific topic.


 

3.  The Brief  Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

As a science fiction and fantasy geek, and a fat one at that, Oscar had my sympathies pretty much from the word Go, since he is both of those things and socially penalized for it. All the sections from his POV were a quick easy read and a ruefully amusing delight.

It was also a pleasant surprise to go from Oscar, who sees his older sister very much as a force of nature into whose motivations he cannot see, to get into her head and find another complicated sympathetic and three dimensional character with a more nuanced relationship to Oscar and indeed everyone than he had ever guessed. (I also had extra personal I-can-relate points because of the setting: Oscar grows up in Patterson, where an ex of mine grew up, also gaming and being looked at askance for it, and then goes to college around the corner from where I grew up. But again, not necessary for enjoyment)

I was not as into it when the narrative took a turn into generational family saga back in Santo Domingo -- this is a personal thing, not a flaw in the writing, but I  hate books where three generations of family have to work through one issue. One of the reasons I tend to eschew mainstream fiction and stick with F&SF is that that is almost an unknown trope in genre -- all the "Luke I Am Your Father" stuff notwithstanding, SF characters tend to make their own destiny, not have it come down to them in their blood, their social position or in this case, a family curse. But then again it would be a short step to argue that part of the reason Oscar is such a geek is that he feels the same way about it that I do and wants to escape this, and who could blame him?

Anyway, the book is basically Oscar's Quest to Get Loved, or At Least Laid, and it progresses to one of those bittersweet sad-yet-redemptive endings that I usually love, but for me this is a little spoiled by my pressing desire to TAKE OSCAR TO A CON ALREADY. I cannot help thinking that pretty as it is, none of this Big Epic Stuff would have been necessary. This is where the weird parallelism of this book to my life starts getting in the way, because I was there, then, and I knew plenty of fat gamer guys with intermittent social skills and good female friends who didn't want to date them, and while it was undoubtedly not always an easy process most of those people got not only laid, but married. It's like watching somebody go on the Grail Quest when all they really needed was a Big Gulp..
 

4. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I adored this book. On one level it could almost pass for a cozy, at least at first -- halcyon memories of childhood at a sheltered British boarding school. In a way I wish I hadn't known what was coming, although I wouldn't have ever picked it up if I hadn't, because Ishiguro is such a master at dribbling out the small disquieting details that tell you this is not Camelot. (Do not read past here if you want to have that experience and are willing to trust me that this turns out to be science fiction).

What I knew, and what Ishiguro slowly reveals (in a way that mirrors the way it is slowly revealed to the children as they grow up) is that these children are sterile clones, raised to be organ donors. After they grow up they will eventually become "carers" for active donors -- something between a home health aide and a social worker -- and then donors themselves, until they "complete" after somewhere between 2 and 4 donations.

In order to stick with a book I need at least one sympathetic protagonist, and Ishiguro gives it to me in spades -- this is sympathy as a weapon, a point of view I can't NOT empathize with, cannot distance myself from, even as horrors pile on horrors in a quiet, ordinary way. He keeps the focus relentlessly small bore -- she is not telling us The Story of British Cloning, she is telling us the story of her two best friends from school and how they grew up. But in the process you find out -- not everything, there are logistics that don't really make sense unless they're meant to be social engineering,  making them drive all over the country so they don't realize they're imprisoned and they're too tired to think. But I didn't even think of that until long after I'd closed the book, and it doesn't really matter. You find out why their school was the way it was, and why they were told what they were told.

One of the most horrifying things is how little they are asking, on both sides. The good guys among the "normal" people devote their lives to fighting for better quality of life for the clones, not an end to raising human beings for organ harvesting, and the clones are asking for a chance to work in an office, for a deferral, a few years to be together if they can prove to some outside judges that they are really in love. Nobody runs. Nobody  forms the underground clone army.


I know some people don't like science fiction written by mainstream authors; this book has pretty much all of those markers, so don't go here if that gets up your nose. But for everyone else, particularly fans of PD James' The Children of Men, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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