So. I love Robert Jackson Bennett. His Divine Cities trilogy is probably my favorite fantasy series of all time; they are so good that I went and bougSo. I love Robert Jackson Bennett. His Divine Cities trilogy is probably my favorite fantasy series of all time; they are so good that I went and bought all of his other books as soon as I was done with those. And they are really amazing. But this novella just freaked the fuck out of me. In a good way? I read the synopsis, and I thought, “Jeez, Mr. Bennett, couldn’t you have stuck to fiction?”. He's clearly very angry at American gun culture, the media that takes fear-mongering to another level, the predatory way advertisers use social media, and the vapid devotion of the public to reality tv. This novella is how he patched those things together.
In an imaginary America, 30 or 40 years from now, marketers have found a way to monetize on mass shootings, by turning them into reality TV. This means that people who want to commit mass shootings can apply to be contestants on this show, which scouts out the optimal location to get as much viewership and interest as possible. Survivors will get money rewards, as will anyone who can actually take down the hostile shooters. But this particular episode of "Vigilance" goes awry in a horrifying way.
I’m Canadian: we have a lot of guns up here too, but we don’t do the mass shooting thing very often. It happens, sure, but not on a regular basis. My husband is American: we go see his family a few times a year, and I’d be lying if I said that I don’t feel a certain pressure lifting off of my shoulders when we cross the border back into the land of maple syrup.
I was sadly not surprised to see a few people found this novella heavy-handed and to be the work of a city slicker who doesn’t understand gun ownership. I am of the opinion that you don’t need to “understand gun ownership” (whatever that means) to grasp the idea that there are too many mass shootings taking place in the United States, and that sensationalism is what drives the media. How hard is it to imagine a marketer with zero moral barometer would simply choose to cash out on that?
A punch-to-the-gut novella by a very talented writer. It brought “The Sheep Look Up” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) to my mind, as it is as relevant and prescient as Brunner’s book. It is well-written, without frills (the topic doesn't really call for frills), and yes, it's a bit didactic, but it's an interesting portrait of what could happen...
Robert: I want to hug you and make you a cup of tea. You sound like you need a hug and a cup of tea. We all do....more
I decided I had to read the conclusion of the brilliant “Broken Earth Trilogy” quickly after I finished “The Obelisk Gate” (https://www.goodreads.com/I decided I had to read the conclusion of the brilliant “Broken Earth Trilogy” quickly after I finished “The Obelisk Gate” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), to make sure the tantalizing set up was still fresh in my mind. I had spent most of book two thinking, “OK, cool, great! What happens next?!”, which is typical of middle books. And since it ends more or less on a cliffhanger, “The Stone Sky” really couldn’t wait too long.
Obviously, I can’t recap it without giving all the good stuff away, so I won’t go into any specifics. “The Stone Sky” picks up right where “The Obelisk Gate” ended, and through three different narrative stands, Jemisin continues to follow Essun’s quest to find her daughter and fulfil the dangerous but crucial mission Alabaster has given her, as well as Nassun’s “education” and relationship with her renegade guardian; she also gives us tantalizing glimpses into the Stillness’ past history, and how it came to be the hostile and unstable place it is now. It’s a very unusual narrative frame, but it works so well with this particular story. The patterns of Essun’s life and how they impact her daughter, and the way she makes all of her subsequent decisions, make this entire trilogy very strong and real: it is so dangerous to underestimate the effect we have on other people, especially the ones very close to us, and how this impact can create tidal waves further down the line.
Jemisin’s talent is undeniable, as is her command of complicated and well-drawn characters. No one in that broad cast is simple, or what they appear at first glance, and it is wonderful to watch them act and react as the highly volatile world they evolve in throws curve balls at them, over and over. But really, it is the intricate complexity of her world building that stuns me the most: of course this world is incredibly different from the one we know, with its weird blend of fantasy and sci-fi elements, but human beings remain true to their nature, cataclysmic events or not – and history will never really stop repeating itself as long as oppression and exploitation will be cornerstones of a society. Jemisin doesn’t aim to lecture, but she nevertheless delivers a story that’s quite thought-provoking and deeply moving.
One thing I always worry about in final books is: will I get some answers? And more importantly, will I find those answers satisfying? This is crucial because it will essentially make or break an entire series. While this particular trilogy requires a bit of patience, it slowly reveals its hows and whys in a truly rewarding way. This story ends exactly as it should.
It gets 4 stars because as much as I loved it, it does suffer from an occasional bout of dry prose, and found myself wishing it had done just a bit more to draw me into the atmosphere and the world Jemisin so carefully created. But this is a minor complaint, and the series as a whole is truly remarkable, and deserves all the praise that has been heaped on it. Very highly recommended....more
Catholic science-fiction about nuclear annihilation. OK, I definitely need to check this out, I thought, pulling it out of my husband’s grandmother’s Catholic science-fiction about nuclear annihilation. OK, I definitely need to check this out, I thought, pulling it out of my husband’s grandmother’s enormous stash of sci-fi books. In a world where anti-science imbeciles are the reason I have barely left my apartment in 18 months (just get vaccinated, you filthy animals!), it was difficult not to cringe at times, reading a book about how a culture of anti-intellectualism effectively ruined everything. It is also fascinating to see that religion can be built around the most mundane silliness, which gets elevated to holiness because it’s not understood quite right.
I read a little bit about Mr. Miller, who used his experience as a soldier in WWII, his trauma and the way he was helped and sheltered by the monks of a Catholic monastery, as strong sources of inspiration for the three connected stories that make up “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. But there is quite a bit to unpack with this book.
Made of three novellas, each set about 600 years apart, this book describes a world where a nuclear war has destroyed most of our civilization and brought what's left of humanity back to an almost medieval society. But not everything has been lost: an engineer sought refuge with a religious community during the Simplification, when the uneducated masses blamed scientists for what had happened to humanity and destroyed all science and technology, and they have been keeping his documents safe for hundreds of years. Collectively known as the Memorabilia, those documents are preserved and copied by monks. Eventually, this knowledge will be brought back to light, and slowly but surely, humanity will rebuilt itself to a level closer to the one we are familiar with, but at what cost? And are the mistakes of the past bound to repeat themselves?
This book is an obvious product of Cold War anxiety, but it is also an very interesting thought-experiment on the cyclical nature of history, the way empires rise to glorious peaks of prosperity and sophisticated technology only to crumble, bring everyone back down to a miserable dark age, which is then followed by a slow rebuilt. Rinse and repeat. Miller seemed to think we were on the brink of tipping ourselves straight back into darkness, and alas, a quick look at current events makes it hard to disagree with him entirely. It is also a brilliantly realized post-apocalyptic story, and using the monastery devoted to St. Leibowitz as the central location that binds the three different stories together is absolutely genius. Little elements that may or may not be supernatural, thrown in for good measure, remind us that not matter how mundane our reality is, there is always a small element of the unexplained in life that we have to reconcile with our view of reality. The writing is strong, the pacing flows very well and the society imagined by Miller rings alarmingly believable.
Alas, like most Golden Age Sci-Fi, there are precious few coherent and meaningful female characters, and while I can admire the ideas, and the prose of a book like this one, this unevenness always bugs me a little. It takes over 200 pages for a female character to get a single line, and yes, I get that this isn't the point of this story, that an all-male monastery won't exactly be crawling with female characters... but it's impossible for me not to be in the least bit annoyed with this, hence the 4 stars instead of 5. I can't help but feel like, while Miller had a wild and rich imagination about what might happen post-nuclear disaster, his imagination was not rich enough to imagine what role women would play in that world, which bums me out.
Regardless, this is a fantastic and strong book, which is well deserving of it's classic status in the pantheon of science-fiction, and which completely deserved the Nebula it was awarded....more
I loved, loved, loved Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), and despite the mixed reviews about "Never Let Me Go", I felt curious enough to check it out. I flipped the last page and scratched my head for a few minutes wondering how the Hell the man who wrote one of my favorite books could have written this weird novel.
"Never Let Me Go" is the story of the formative years of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. They are students at a fancy and isolated boarding school called Hailsham, and its very easy to figure out the purpose of the mysterious institution early on. But hints are dropped agonizingly slowly as we explore the three characters' friendships and the loose love triangle that united them.
This is a really quiet and introspective take on the ideas of genetic manipulation and humane organ farming. The subject in an of itself is interesting, and has been explored in other sci-fi and dystopian works. I love that topic because it digs at the ideas of compassion, what makes a person human, whether some are more deserving of life than others, the dangers of cloning technology, the problem of the soul. All fascinating stuff, right? The problem with this book is that the narrator, Kathy, is incredibly boring, that the events described are uninteresting, and that despite Kathy's best effort, I never found myself caring about Tommy or Ruth and their rather bleak fate. And I can't decide if that's because they are shitty characters or if that's because they were brought up all wrong by the people who ran Hailsham.
I lost track of how many times Kathy tells a story, only to inform the reader that to understand this anecdote, she should probably tell you this other story... Most annoying framed narrative technique ever, not to mention very repetitive. This could have been an interesting coming of age story, but the characters don't mature at all. Then there are plenty of rather unbelievable elements, such as blind acceptation of the characters' life purpose and the idea that society tolerates them but is also repulsed by them. The movie "The Island" made that premise ridiculous but more believable somehow...
The prose is very pretty: that's really the only good thing I found in this book, so it gets two stars; but I think I'm done with Ishiguro....more
Following a book as inventive and original as "The Fifth Season" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) is tricky, especially when the follow-up iFollowing a book as inventive and original as "The Fifth Season" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) is tricky, especially when the follow-up is not the conclusion, but a middle book that basically sets the table for the final installment of a trilogy. The surprise and awe of discovering a new world is gone, and while the book expands on the universe and the characters, it also brings up yet more unanswered questions – and you know the resolutions are in the next one! Argh!
I really enjoyed “The Obelisk Gate”, but I quickly realized I should have read it a lot sooner after finishing “The Fifth Season” than I did: Jemisin’s world-building is so complex and intricate that a few months between the two books was enough time for many details and names to have slipped my memory, and I spent almost a hundred pages wondering “Who is that guy again? Oh, right, right!”. That being said, a huge strength of her story-telling is her ability to create rich and complex dynamics between her characters, and watching them evolve through those relationship amply makes up for the few minutes of confusions I would experience from time to time. The moral ambiguity and tough choices Essun, her daughter and all the others wrangle with is fascinating and engaging.
It is a bit difficult to summarize, especially as this is a hinge book (and I don’t want to give anything from the first book away), but “The Obelisk Gate” picks up minutes after where “The Fifth Season” concluded: Essun has been reunited with Alabaster in Castmira, where she will have to make her place in the comm and carry on the work her old mentor started. In parallel, we finally find out what happened to Nessun after Jija brutally murdered her brother and vanished. Jija will follow rumours to a southern comm, in the hope of finding a “cure” for his daughter. Torn between her love for her father, and her understanding of his hatred of a fundamental part of her, Nassun will develop a strong bond with a new mentor and begin to understand a lot about her mother – and why she did the things she did.
The prose is clean and breezy to read, but I admit I wished it had been worked on a bit more. It is very unusual for a second-person narration to work as well as it does here, and Nemisin uses this device cleverly, and with good reasons, but it can get a bit awkward at time. That nitpicking aside, this installment propels the story in a nail-biting direction very effectively: I will probably read “The Stone Sky” very soon, while this is all still fresh in my mind. A solid four stars!...more
“Why did they do it?” “Because they could.” That is the only answer there ever is.
The topic of violence against women and the fear they live in is ob“Why did they do it?” “Because they could.” That is the only answer there ever is.
The topic of violence against women and the fear they live in is obviously in the zeitgeist, and in the wake of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and its glorious TV adaptation, I suppose books like this one are bound to pop up. And it’s hard not to be tempted to read them, especially when you feel concerned by the subject matter. But Margaret Atwood set the bar very, very high for feminist dystopia… While the metaphor this book bases itself on is far from subtle, it would be hard to deny that it gets its point across. I am all for using speculative fiction to address real-world issues, as has masterfully been done by LeGuin, Bradbury and other brilliant luminaries of the genre. This is what Alderman is doing here, but I’m afraid that as relevant as her topic may be, she’s just a bit too heavy-handed. I think she bit off more than she could chew, and would have delivered a more compelling story if she had kept it shorter and less “international conspiracy”.
“The Power” used a framed narrative of historical research to tell the story of how one day, young girls developed the power to send electrical current through their hands, and inflict terrible pain – and even death – to people they would touch. Soon, girls and women from the entire world harness this unexplained electromagnetic capacity, and will use it not only to defend themselves, but to get revenge on those who have hurt and subjugated them in the past. You get where this is going, right? The story is told through four characters’ points of view: Roxy, the spunky daughter of a British gangster, Allie, a girl who has lived a life of abuse and uses her power to establish herself as a sort of pseudo-religious figure, Margot, a single mother and mayor, and Tunde, a young Nigerian journalist who documents the changes brought on to society by this power all over the world.
I personally really enjoy challenging gender-based double standards, and questioning the idea that women are inherently maternal, caring and nonviolent is important. The idea of a reversal of the power structure is fascinating, and it is only too easy to also imagine the titular power being abused recklessly by some. Such a thought experiment is especially relevant in our current culture and political climate, after all. The argument made by Alderman here is obvious: this is not about gender so much as it is about power, and its capacity to corrupt well-meaning people – something she clearly believes no one is immune to. But as mentioned earlier, she is not very subtle about making her points, and it gets tedious. I’m not a big fan of books that try to beat an idea into my skull… even when I agree with the idea.
What also irritates me about a story like this is that it never shows any example of healthy relationships between a man and a woman. There is a broad-stroke assumption that all such relationships are ultimately a power struggle, with a partner inevitably subjugated by the other. Really?! Eh… I’m looking forward to reading a book about sane and balanced people in a healthy relationship: that will be a refreshing change (while potentially being a bit boring, from a storytelling perspective). What we get here instead is that everyone is awful all the time. No such things as allies, eh?
Alderman’s idea might have delivered a more effective punch if she hadn’t spread her story so thin; I think that a focus on one or two characters, and how they adapt to this strange new world would have been more impactful than then huge scope she went for, which I feel ultimately diluted the points she was trying to get across.
2 and a half stars rounded up because it isn’t bad, but there is much better feminist speculative fiction out there....more
I am not sure what to make of this one. It was full of amazing ideas, but I feel like they were not explored deeply enough to be fu3 and a half stars.
I am not sure what to make of this one. It was full of amazing ideas, but I feel like they were not explored deeply enough to be fully satisfying.
In the not too far future, a lot of the world has flooded and many people live in the floating city of Qaanaaq, near Iceland. This city is home to refugees from all over the world, but the true power in a place like this is in the hands of the landlords who own the living spaces and the shareholders who helped finance the creation of the city. Everyone else, in their own way, struggles. A strange disease is making is turning into an epidemic: known simply as “the breaks”, the disease seems to be sexually transmitted, but affects mostly the poor and destitute of Qaanaaq. The breaks causes a sort of confusion, what seems to be hallucinations and visions of memories that don’t belong to the sick person. It’s in this world that Ankit, Kaev, Soq and Fill scrape a living. Their lives are very different, and they do not seem to be connected in any way, but the arrival of a strange woman, riding an orca and followed by a polar bear, will change everything, and reveal the bonds that unite them just below the surface.
At first, I thought that the breaks might have been a metaphor for AIDS, but I now think it’s more about interconnectedness – but you’ll have to read the book to see what changed my mind about it. I really loved the idea of the floating city, the grit and strange politics of such a place being richly imagined by Miller, but as mentioned earlier, I wish we had explored it a little bit more. We only got enough information and description to place the characters in their settings and better understand their lives, and I craved a broader view of Qaanaaq. A lot of emphasis was put on making the cast of characters very diverse, and it was wonderful to read about those people who felt real and not stereotypical.
I read that Sam Miller’s work was mostly YA, and maybe that’s why I found “Blackfish City” to be just shy of fully satisfying; I wanted the envelope to be pushed just a little further. Nevertheless, the ideas explored in this book are brilliant, the pacing and the compassionate writing make this a lovely work of post-apocalyptic fiction....more
After a underwhelming experience with “Titanium Noir”, I remembered I had a copy of Nick Harkaway’s “Gnomon” just sitting there on my shelf, unread, aAfter a underwhelming experience with “Titanium Noir”, I remembered I had a copy of Nick Harkaway’s “Gnomon” just sitting there on my shelf, unread, and I went to pick it up because I wanted the Harkaway who had written “The Gone-Away World” and my beloved “Angelmaker”; the one who wrote ambitious and tentacular tapestry novels that felt both surreal and deeply relevant at the same time. That was when I realized that the book I had was in fact an uncorrected proof that had been gathering dust since the publication date. Oops. Oh, well, better late than never, I guess!
As usual with a Harkaway novel, summarizing it without giving any of the good stuff away is impossible: there are simply too many things going on. But what you can expect is that the near future world he imagines feels a lot like an episode of “Black Mirror”, in which the UK has become a sophisticated surveillance state that is quite unfriendly to people who would chose to go live off the grid, and when one such dissident citizen dies after a routine interrogation procedure, the Investigator on the case begins to dig and finds things that make her question her allegiance to the perfect System she has been a part of all her life. We also get a glimpse into the life of a high-rolling financial advisor who, after an uncomfortably close encounter with a great white shark, begins to notice strange patterns in his work and wonders if they are linked to a national financial crisis he may or may not be responsible for. We also encounter an alchemist living in Rome at the same time as St. Augustine, who is summoned by her religious enemies when they are faced with a mystery they can’t solve, and an Ethiopian artist living in London just before the Brexit vote, who’s grand daughter is on the brink of creating technology that will change the world as we know it – and not without serious consequences.
Those quick dips into lives that seem unrelated to the main plot are very well executed, and tie together later on, but it can definitely feel a bit jarring to dip in and out of their story; Harkaway uses those POV chapters in a beautifully introspective way, and really gives the characters unique voices with which to describe the world they live in. He has always been very good at inner monologue, and his talent is really on display here.
There’s a lot of Orwell and Philip K. Dick influence here, but Harkaway is his own person: you see the influence but never feel like you are reading a pastiche, even if the System gave me strong “1984” vibes. Some of the concepts in this book, such as criticism of the surveillance state and the fine balance between individual freedom and safety, are not new, but they are made fresh by the way they are explored. Harkaway uses a clever narrative device to put the reader in his characters’ heads, and as with previous novels of his, many of them fall in a morally grey area. He also clearly loves his hard-boiled detective novels, but this isn’t as much of an obvious effort to fit in that genre as “Titanium Noir” was.
A few reviews of “Gnomon” seem to indicate that Harkaway likes to weave yarns that are too all over the place and weird for some readers, and that’s totally OK; maybe he was trying to be more accessible with “Titanium Noir”. But I personally really like the mind-workout I get from his more convoluted books like this one. I trust him enough to dive in with both feet and read hundreds of pages without really knowing where I am going because at this point, I believe that the destination will make the journey worth it, and that I might just feel like reading the book all over again looking for clues I will have missed on the first go. I must say that while that can sound intimidating (that and the page count!), I still find his writing very readable, despite the complex subject matters.
I think that it’s probably fairer to criticize Harkaway for sometimes lacking in subtlety: he very clearly doesn’t trust the government or corporations to consistently do the right thing when it comes to handling people’s data and private information, he hates investment bankers and believes our own hubris will be our doom; when he preaches to the choir, it’s easy to let that heavy-handedness slide, but I can see how it could be eyeroll-inducing for some readers. I would also say that it might be his most serious novel: there was a definite sense of humor in “Angelmaker” that isn’t present here. There are lighter moments that are kind of funny (the shark encounter, while potentially terrifying, is actually fairly amusing because… shark enlightenment!), but mostly the tone is more ominous, an attempt at drawing attention to a potential future we don’t really want to live in. I totally get what he was doing, but I confess that I missed his sense of whimsy in this one.
Beyond the subtext, this book is a wonderful ‘Russian nesting doll’ kind of novel, and the world imagined is quite believable as a speculation on where the way we interact with technology that accesses our most private information will lead us. And this was written before the current AI boom, and it doesn’t feel dated or off the mark. I have seen a review that recommends it to people who enjoy Ted Chiang and David Foster Wallace, and though I have only dipped my toes in DFW’s catalogue, I think that’s a fair recommendation. Maybe “Titanium Noir” was indeed, a fluke, because this is a solid and important near-future sci-fi novel. Formidable but rewarding. ...more
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