50books_poc | Entries tagged with science fiction

The Mimicking of Known Successes presents a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter, by Malka Older, author of the critically-acclaimed Centenal Cycle.

The premise here sounded right up my alley, but the writing style really wasn’t for me and I had a lot of difficulty following along with the investigation plot. I do believe people who enjoy Sci-Fi Mystery with a healthy dash of sapphic romance (exes who have to work together!) will have better luck than me with this novella.

cesy

Black No More by George Schuyler is early sci-fi about race. I found it very much in the style of its era rather than modern pacing and readability, but really good. It does the thought-provoking thought experiment on society that a certain type of speculative fiction is really good at. And given its age, it's easy to find cheap or free ebooks. Check the blurb for the concept if you might need content notes, but I can't quite work out how to summarise effectively without spoilers.

kore

This was my first book for the 2019

50books_poc challenge. I loved it. My review is here. Very highly recommended.

yatima

Hey there, it's been a little while, hasn't it? I finished the audiobook of Dhalgren a few weeks ago, but I haven't stopped thinking about it.

First, a few notes on the audiobook. I wouldn't have finished Dhalgren without it. That said, the performance of narrator Stefan Rudnicki made me cringe. I try to avoid fiction audiobooks with male narrators anyway, because when men do women's voices it always feels like mockery to me. Rudnicki signals femaleness with a higher pitch, breathiness, and rising intonation, which makes his female characters sound stupid. I mentioned this to my partner, who said: "At least he's not trying to do an Australian accent!" (We are both Australian.) Cue the Australian character Ernest Newboys, whose nationality boiled down to a handful of vowel sounds mostly suggestive of a cry for help.

Much worse than all of this, though, is the fact that Delany makes liberal use of the n-word, including putting it into the mouths of non-Black characters. Rudnicki read each instance in full. There's an argument to be made for preserving the integrity of the text, but that argument did nothing for the whole-body shudder of revulsion I experienced every single time I heard a white man say that word. In conclusion, please have a Black narrator re-record this book, it's 2017.

Onto Dhalgren. I read it the way you'd climb a mountain. I've been walking around for a year or more saying that I wanna write gay science fiction, and this is a landmark of gay SF the way the Chrysler building is a landmark of Art Deco New York. It's also the most sustained of Delany's efforts to write science fiction that is also a serious, literary novel. On that level it's a stunning success. The most similar books I've read to Dhalgren (and they're not particularly similar) are Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, and Lanark. Pynchon's book, published 1973, is near-contemporaneous.

Like its three (post-)modernist doorstopper brothers, Dhalgren feels deeply autobiographical, especially read in conjunction with Delany's actual autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water. I'm less interested in the specific correspondences between Delany's life and that of his protagonist Kidd than in the creative transformation of the material. A lot of the book is frankly mythic. A woman turns into a tree. There are two moons in the sky. Other threads are metatextual, almost to the point of jokiness: Kidd finds a notebook containing what seems to be an earlier draft of Dhalgren. Names are Dickensian. Newboys is Kidd's foil in the early part of the book, when he is still finding his feet. Later, more confident and getting his gay on, Kidd spends a lot of time with the astronaut, Captain Kamp.

Yet these flights of fancy are grounded in lived experience, and that's what makes Dhalgren work. Delany's especially good on the negotiations that let us live with one another and ourselves. Kidd's ambiguous erotic encounters and his efforts to negotiate an hourly rate for some contract work are equally, utterly recognizable. Kidd is compelled to write, hates writing, is inordinately proud of his poetry and unsure to the end whether or not it's any good. Delany's women, who are not stupid, face precisely-observed extra obstacles to self-realization, and these are tenderly conveyed. A polyamorous triad that shows up later in the book is probably the best-drawn I have ever read.

Delany has no qualms, though, and maybe this is the rub. Dhalgren was, for me, a difficult book to like. Cruelty and exploitation are drawn with the same cold eye as kindness and affection. Characters have little agency, and when they try to exercise what little they have, they're often ridiculed for it. It's an unsparing portrait of a frighteningly ugly world.

Maybe, probably, liking isn't the point. Dhalgren made me think very hard about my own creative process, and about my way of being in the world. I feel like I lived in Bellona for a little while, saw a nest of scorpions, smelled a decaying corpse, felt the caress of an orchid blade on my skin.

yatima

Every time Molly bleeds, a murder follows. That was the hook that got me to read this book, and I'm so glad I did. I loved Molly, her pragmatic way of dealing with her predicament and her longing for a different life. I loved her father and especially her strange and secretive mother. I loved Molly's take-no-prisoners attitude to university, which reminded me irresistibly of Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching, another modern Gothic novel I adored. I came for the uncanny and stayed for the unexpectedly wrenching.

She spends weeks just sitting in the front room reading a pile of books she has wanted to read forever. She does not mind that she cannot feel anything—she is not ready to deal with her heart yet.

To my delight, this is the first of a series, and has already been optioned for a film. I'm seriously impressed with the quality of what Tor.com has been publishing this year. Novella-length works were obviously way overdue for a revival. (In other news, I have another 24 hours of Dhalgren to get through on Audible, please keep me in your thoughts and prayers.)

yatima

Four fiercely brilliant stories, in order of increasing brilliance. The first deals with toxic masculinity in an unbelievably prescient way, given our current predicament:

This was the other side of their bravado. She looked at him with such infinite care and respect, for she hadn’t known before how much more terrifying it was to be a man than to be a woman.

The second is a laugh-out-loud grimdark Black Mirror episode set in space. The third is a (maybe?) love story so weird it reminded me of Flatland.

But the fourth story! That one, a picaresque journey through space with a hauntingly familiar subtext, brought to mind my Dad's exquisite first edition of The Ship that Sailed to Mars, and all of Borges, and George Takei's Twitterstream. And if that combination doesn't pique your interest, I don't even know what to tell you.

yatima

This series grows increasingly dear to my heart. "Binti" is an Arabic word for "daughter" (as "Yatima", which I stole from Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, is an Arabic word for "orphan".) Okorafor's books stand alone as excellent stories, but they're vastly enriched by the fact that they are engaged in intense conversation with other texts. There's a book about post-colonialist literature with the fantastic title The Empire Writes Back, and that's a useful shorthand for Okorafor's larger project.

Lagoon, for example, was born from Okorafor's disgust at the treatment of Nigerians in the film District 9. It's probably my favorite first contact novel. In the same way, the Binti series takes on the particular space opera genre where humans have learning experiences among aliens: Have Space Suit Will Travel, A Wrinkle in Time, A Fire Upon the Deep. In the first book, Binti travels to Oomza University, the first of her people to do so. This book describes what's probably the definitive experience of exile: returning to your birthplace utterly changed.

“You’re too complex, Binti,” he said. “That’s why I stayed away. You’re my best friend. You are. And I miss you. But, you’re too complex. And look at you; you’re even stranger now.”

It works perfectly because it isn't a metaphor. I'm Australian and I like to joke that I grew up on a mining asteroid, but it's not really a joke. I went to graduate school in Ireland and even with a shared language and colonial history, it was like visiting another planet. Okorafor's genius is teasing out the ways in which people of Earth are alien to one another, as well as the ways in which the terrifying Other, if we can only see past the terror, may turn out to be an ally and friend. She is a vitally necessary writer and we are lucky to have her.

seekingferret

21 India Calling by Anand Giridharadas

India Calling is a book I read as I tried to write Midnight's Children fanfiction, updating Rushdie's style for an India that has changed since that book was written thirty years ago. It is in some senses typical of a booming sub-genre of nonfiction works about "the New India", coming to grips with the rise of capitalism, the rise of economic and social and intellectual mobility, and all the associated changes those things bring with them. There are a lot of such books- Giridharadas comfortably situates himself within the subgenre by comparing his experiences to those reported in a few of them. As I ended up writing in my story, "Anyone with a pen and paper is writing that India doesn't have a story, and they will sell it to you if you give them the chance."

Giridharadas himself was the son of Indian immigrants to America who then moved back to India as an adult. His perspective is interesting. He's an outsider, but he speaks the language and knows intellectually the customs, so he can get past the exoticization that true Westerners visiting India often subject their readers to. But his perspective is still outsiderly. He feels comfortable reproaching native Indians for behaviors he finds misguided, but also spends a lot of time deconstructing his own mistaken assumptions about India- as backward, religiously intolerant, unambitious, and addicted to poverty and corruption. I really appreciated the humility he brought to his study.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, and though I don't think I ended up using any specific details from it in the fic, the sense he gave me of how India has evolved and how people feel about the evolution ended up being a major guiding force as I developed themes.

22 Dancers on the Shore by William M. Kelley

Kelley is a writer I would never have known about had I not literally googled for African-American literary novelists when I first started doing

50books_poc, about three and a half years ago, and discovering him is one of the things I am most grateful to this challenge for. He writes gracefully and complicatedly about the mid-20th-century African-American experience and at times the broader American experience. A Different Drummer, his debut novel, which was one of the first books I read for this challenge, remains one of my favorites.

Dancers on the Shore is a short story collection published not long after A Different Drummer, and it is more of a mixed bag, as short story collections often are. Some of the stories are a part of a roughly continuous family cycle that continues throughout Kelley's novels and culminates in the messy post-modern soup of Dunfords Travels Everywheres. Others are standalone. Some of them feel like early sketches added to fill up the book, while others are marvelous in the depth of character and emotion that Kelly is able to show in so little space.

Though all of his characters are African-American, explicit and even implicit discussions of racial politics are rare (the first page is an invocation from the author begging to be treated as an author instead of as an African-American author who has anything at all to say about the Race Question). The stories are mostly family dramas, characters discovering things about themselves and about the people close to them. A mother contemplates divorcing her husband. A son visits his extended family and learns about his father's childhood. A young woman contemplates an illegal abortion. Two old men endure retirement together. All of these subjects are handled with sensitivity and ambiguity.

23 Terminal Point by KM Ruiz

I loved the first book in Ruiz's Stryker Syndicate series of cyberpunky post-apocalyptic psionic action-adventures, but this one, the second, was more uneven. It was beautifully plotted and paced, and it had more of the great characters from the first book, but it stinted on setting. I knew I was in for a good show with Mind Storm from the first scene, which threw us on a train moving across the radioactive wasteland between the husk of Las Vegas and the husk oif Los Angeles. The location was so atmospheric, interesting, and real feeling that it intensified all of the action. Terminal Point bounces through a lot more locations, and a lot more exotic locations, but none of them feel as rich and real as the settings from the first book. Many of them have their interesting features infodumped at us rather than being allowed to present themselves naturally. The plot subordinated the world building, unfortunately, and the result was a book that offered satisfying resolution to open plots from the first book, but not a book that was as satisfying on its own terms.

alias_sqbr

I stopped counting books when I realised it was making reading feel like a chore. While I've read a lot of manga I realised I'd never read any novels by Japanese people, so I decided to make a special effort to do so.

Under the cut:
Meanwhile by Jason Shiga
Aya by Margauerite Aboue
The Manga Guide to Databases by Mana Takahashi
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa
Twelve Kingdoms: Shadow of the Moon by Fuyumi Ono
Harboiled and Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto

( Read more... )

ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com

The Lifecycle of Software Objects may be a novella, but its story stretches out over years, with Chiang providing a compelling narrative which leads us through the early years in the life of several digients, i.e. computer software avatars imbued with artificial intelligence. The story begins with their creation and development as overseen by two people who work at Blue Gamma, the company that creates them: Ana and Derek. Both are impressed with the technology and quickly become attached to the childish avatars. While the digients are a success, their popularity is short-lived. Being first generation digients they quickly become unpopular and out-moded. While most are quick to abandon their digients, Ana and Derek adopt some and develop a child-parent bond with these cyber creatures, eventually proving they will do almost anything to ensure their safety even as the online world limits their choices.

There is a curious lack of sensory detail in the book. This has been a frustrating feature of Chiang's previous work, but the absence is particularly felt here, when the differences between the flatness of the online world and the richness of the real world is made so apparent. In Chiang's world the digients are able to transcend the online world by downloading their software into a robot body which allows them to interact with their trainers in a new way. Ana, training her future digient adoptee, is hugged by him in his robot form, an obviously emotional moment. Later the narrator notes that Not surprisingly, the sensor pads in the robot's fingers are the first thing that needs replacement. In the world of the novella, the avatars become enchanted by the real world, craving time in the robot suit so that they can feel. Unfortunately, Chiang's world is devoid of any richness in detail which leaves an uncomfortable void running through the novella. There are also some truly terrible transitions. The story flips through the years at a brisk pace, but Chiang often chooses to convey this with the phrase A year passed which seems clumsy the first time it is used and downright annoying by the sixth or seventh time.

What Chiang does excellently though is track the decline and fall of the digients. There is an undercurrent of sweetness and nostalgia running through the book. The more time and energy their care-givers give to the digients and the more self-aware and intelligent they become, the better they are able to realize that software incompatibilities mean that their world is rapidly shrinking. The ugly choices that Ana and Derek consider in order to give them a full "life" are devastating and would have seemed even more so if only Chiang had spent a little more time on the emotional and a little less of the scientific.

ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com

Stories of Your Life & Others boasts an incredible pedigree and came to me highly recommended from a wide variety of individuals. Virtually every story in the book has been previously published by a big name literary magazine (Asimov's, Omni, etc) and have won awards. I came to the book with high expectations and was left disappointed.

The problem with Stories of Your Life is one that is often levelled at sci-fi writers by its detractors; the ideas are good, the writing is flat. In fact, in this case, their often isn't much of a story there at all. In Understand a man becomes hyper intelligent as a result of a clinical drug study. The story is about 40 pages long and a good 35 of those is spent simply describing the man's new found intelligence. Some conflict does eventually arise (a great conflict in fact), but is quickly dealt with in the last few pages of the story. This is pretty much the problem with the rest of the stories in the book. Chiang may be great at coming up with new worlds and interesting concepts, but he is flat out terrible at building a story.

There are a few stories in the collection that manage to escape this tendency of Chiang's to get lost in the science of things. Tower of Babylon, based on the bible story of the Tower of Babel, is interesting and gripping and comes together in a great way. Story of Your Life is messy, but the execution is interesting, even if it's not perfect.

One thing I did appreciate about the book is that there is a section of notes in the back where Chiang talks a little bit about the inspiration behind each story. They're never more than a few paragraphs long, but I thought they were a great addition to the book.

puritybrown.livejournal.com

47: Mardock Scramble by Tow Ubukata

I'll be reviewing this at greater length elsewhere, and when I do I'll post a link here. For now I'll just say: this is a 775-page-long science fiction thriller, part of the Haikasoru line, set in the future city of Mardock, centring on the quest of Rune-Balot, former child prostitute, to retrieve the stored memories of the man who tried to kill her. It's a great big baggy rambunctious mess of a novel, occasionally glorious, often infuriating, full of wild shifts in tone and content. There are flying sharks. There's a gang of assassins who have the body parts of their victims surgically implanted on their bodies. There are many, many metaphors involving eggs. (E.g. the main characters are called Balot, Oeufcoque, Dr Easter, Shell, and Boiled. And there's a casino called Eggnog Blue and an egg-shaped flying home called the Humpty.)

I don't know if I recommend it, exactly; parts of it were enormous fun to read, parts were rather dull, and I don't know that it amounts to very much, all told. Still, it was an interesting ride.

zeborah

New Zealand post-apocalyptic sf/fantasy: rabbit calicivirus has mutated and devastated the population of New Zealand while the rest of the world has succumbed to ebola. I love the early chapters especially for the way the communities get on with what's necessary to survive - this is no libertarian fantasy; people need each other. (It is a bit of a back-to-nature fantasy, otoh. One day I must write a post-apocalypse in which everyone realises that going back to nature sucks big time and desperately works to maintain as much technology as possible.) The black humour rang very true as well.

It did still have the "Manly men must protect themselves from packs of dogs and gangs of irredeemably bad guys" trope in abundance. Women were mostly there to proffer sage advice, be traumatised, get raped, and eventually marry and procreate. Speaking of procreation, the psychology behind the "After a huge population decline everyone has sex like bunnies" thing seemed way off - it was treated like an involuntary biological impulse, something akin to diarrhea; rather than being a comfort, a pleasure, a brief escape from horror, it's seen as a phase that they're hoping they'll get over as soon as possible.

On a broader scale, the supernatural cause behind the outbreak of the virus never felt adequately explained. It was all very vague from the start, but there I accepted it assuming the mystery would be explored and made clear. We did learn some, but I never thought we learned enough for the protagonist to be able to complete his quest and I couldn't even work out what he did do or why it worked. To be fair, the rules are different with faeries so this might just be my own ignorance of the Maeroero. But in a way this was actually almost a bit more travelogue-shaped than quest-shaped and reading it that way might be more satisfying.

zeborah

Song For Night by Chris Abani
About a boy soldier (trained to defuse mines) separated from his platoon after an explosion. A short and easy read (in style if not in content matter. Trigger warnings re the content: skip) the book includes graphic descriptions of violence and of the protagonist being forced to rape a woman.) told in a beautiful prose style. It explores the sign language his platoon uses, his memories of the war, boot camp, the outbreak of violence between Igbo and Fulani, and his childhood.

Huia Short Stories 6
Huia Publishers put out an anthology each year of contemporary Māori fiction. I'm... ultimately not a fan of contemporary fiction, I think. Melanie Drewery's "Weight of the World" stood out for me among the rest, being more humorous in tone. In the author bios at the end, Eru J. Hart, said he "asks that other Māori writers think beyond stories of 'Nanny in the kūmara patch'" -- his own was really interesting stylistically/structurally but in content it wasn't so very distant from what I'm tempted to call 'Sister in the big city' which many stories in this volume shared (and which I recall studying in high school in the form of Witi Ihimaera's "Big Brother Little Sister" (1974)). This isn't a criticism really; it's just that it's not my kind of story so while reading one is fine, reading a dozen in a row is a bit much for me. :-) But if it's the kind of thing you like, then you'll like it.

(The other cool thing about this collection is it includes four stories written in Te Reo, one of which is written in the Kai Tahu dialect. Far beyond my current ability to read, alas, especially as I think I'd have liked to read "Ko Māui me ngā Kūmara a Wiwīwawā".)

Ruahine: mythic women by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku
This anthology, on the other hand, I really enjoyed. For each story, the author gives a brief summary of the original folktale/history, then tells her own interpretation of it. All the stories are about strong women; several include female/female relationships and one a male/male relationship. And of course the reason

kitsuchi recommended it to me in the first place was because one of the stories was science fiction and full of awesomeness.

tala-tale.livejournal.com

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

( Slightly spoilerish review here. )

tala-tale.livejournal.com

I read:
Fledgling, Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents.

I had the library pull a bunch of Butler's stuff all at once; after reading Lilith's Brood, and reading other people's comments that the issues of consent there are pretty typical of Butler's work, I almost didn't read the rest of her books I had. I finally did go ahead and finish them, but I don't know that I'll look for or read any more of her work.

In general, what I find troubling about Butler's work is that it pairs very engaging writing and intriguing premises with squick-inducing issues of consent. She really seems to think that lack of consent is okay as long as whatever's happening is pleasurable -- and to some extent, I feel that carries over into her relationship with her reader.

That is, I find myself so drawn into certain elements of her work that I try to ignore the parts that bother me so I can finish the story -- my pleasure in the elements of her work that are truly GOOD is enough to make me try to ignore the things that are making me want to put the books down. I am uncomfortable with the idea that, by continuing to read, I am essentially saying, "yes, this is enjoyable," and tacitly going along with the idea that these deeply disturbing notions about sex, pleasure, power, and consent are a legitimate part of something I'm doing for entertainment.

That said, I found the Parable set much less troublesome than Lilith's Brood or Fledgling; there wasn't really much that was squick-worthy in it that the reader wasn't clearly supposed to find disturbing -- as someone else mentioned in another conversation about Butler's books (

holyschist's review of Fledgling perhaps?), we're not supposed to LIKE the people who do the bad things, for a change. I didn't, however, find the characters and storyline as emotionally engaging as I'd have liked (particularly in Talents), so while I don't regret having read those two, I can't give them a wildly ecstatic endorsement, either.