Maybe I’m just a sucker for stories about dogs and monkeys, and an even bigger sucker for stories about talking dogs and monkeys, but I absolutely adoMaybe I’m just a sucker for stories about dogs and monkeys, and an even bigger sucker for stories about talking dogs and monkeys, but I absolutely adored “Primordial”.
When I heard that the team who created one of my favorite sci-fi/horror graphic novel series in recent years, “Gideon Falls”, was coming out with a new series, I was excited. Writer Jeff Lemire and artist Andrea Sorrentino are a tremendously talented duo, and “Primordial” just confirms for me that anything that has their names on it is worth reading.
It helps to know a little history about the space program for this one, although the events in “Primordial” deviate from actuality into an alternate history.
In 1957, the Soviet Union sent the first living organism into space. Her name was Laika, a Siberian husky-terrier mutt. She was sent up in Sputnik 2, which later reentered the Earth’ atmosphere and exploded. Laika, it is believed, only survived the first two days of the mission, as the cabin overheated to a point that no creature could survive.
In 1959, NASA sent two female monkeys, Able and Baker, into space in their Jupiter program. They both successfully returned alive.
That’s what really happened.
In the history of “Primordial”, both missions officially ended in failure, and the consequence was the immediate scrapping of the space program.
But, as Doctor Donald Pembrook discovers, in 1961, the public was lied to. Laika, Able, and Baker didn’t perish in outer space. They’re still alive, out there, somewhere. And the extraterrestrials that rescued them are learning a lot about humanity.
I’m not gonna lie: this had me choking up in the end. It’s a short series, but it’s an emotionally powerful one.
God, I hope that our first contact happens with a dog rather than a human. Our chances of survival might be a helluva lot better…...more
I’m always somewhat saddened when I come across a book that I don’t like. I usually feel that it is a failing on my part---Was I not in the right moodI’m always somewhat saddened when I come across a book that I don’t like. I usually feel that it is a failing on my part---Was I not in the right mood? Did I miss something? Am I just not smart enough to “get it”?
Charlaine Harris’s “An Easy Death” hit a lot of the marks for me: it’s an alternate history/fantasy/western; it has a strong female protagonist; it boasts a glowing blurb by Lee Child on the back cover. I mean, slam dunk, right?
Sadly, no. It unfortunately didn’t do anything for me.
In retrospect, there were red flags. I had read only two previous Harris novels prior to this, both of them in the popular Sookie Stackhouse series (a series that inspired the HBO TV show “True Blood”), and I remember not really liking them either.
I know that Ms. Harris is supposed to be somewhat of a Grand Dame in the Paranormal Romance genre, but I simply wasn’t taken in by her writing. Her style is rather simplistic and vapid, in my opinion. I was bored by it.
I’ll give her some credit: the premise in “An Easy Death” was pretty cool. Set in an alternate 1930s rural America in which the Great Depression coincided with the assassination of President FDR and a subsequent nation-wide Native American uprising, what was once the United States of America is now several nation-states that have seceded. The West Coast was taken over by Russia, and is now called the Holy Russian Empire (HRE), after the czar’s family safely escaped the revolution in Russia. The New England states changed hands back to the British and became New Brittania.
Several southwestern states---Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and part of northern Mexico---have become a single nation, Texoma. This is where the protagonist, Rose, is from. She’s a “gunnie”, a hired gun used to protect people passing through some of the lawless parts of Texoma and Mexico, which are overrun with bandits and violent Indians.
So far, so good. I dig the alternate history part. I also dig the element of the supernatural, as the HRE has “outed” wizards, warlocks, and witches, providing a safe haven for anyone with supernatural abilities and a willingness to hone their sorcery skills. The HRE has essentially become a wizard nation.
Gunnie Rose is the product of a wizard who raped her mother. When she was old enough, Rose hunted her father down and killed him. She doesn’t have a very good opinion of wizards, which may be a huge problem after she is hired by two wizards to get them safely to Mexico.
There’s the set-up for the novel. It should have worked for me. It didn’t.
I hate badmouthing books and authors, unless they deserve it, so I won’t do that, because Ms. Harris doesn’t deserve it. Clearly she has a huge following of fans who love her books, and something in her writing resonates with them. It doesn’t with me, and I’m not a fan, but that’s okay. There are plenty of other fish in the sea....more
Slavery takes different forms. There is the familiar image of slavery we all have in our mind---black people in chains, forced to work ridiculously loSlavery takes different forms. There is the familiar image of slavery we all have in our mind---black people in chains, forced to work ridiculously long hours on hot plantation fields, whipped into submission, and beaten if they get “uppity”---but there is also a slavery of the mind, a slavery of thought.
In this kind of slavery, it is an outrage for a black football player to choose not to partake in the National Anthem out of protest. In this kind of slavery, a nonviolent act of protest like this is viewed as “unpatriotic”, “un-American”, and, in the minds of some, punishable by death. Never mind what he is protesting: that's almost irrelevant.
In this kind of slavery, it is acceptable for cops to shoot unarmed black men because black men are, of course, historically more violent, more unpredictable, less able to be controlled. It is also perfectly alright to make constant excuses and rationalizations and justifications for these abusive cops.
In this kind of slavery, it is a given that black people are simply less intelligent than white people. It is a given that black people are unable to live independent lives. It is a given that black people are entitled; they expect their white superiors to bail them out of poverty through free housing and welfare checks and food stamps. It is a given that a black person lives in poverty.
In this kind of slavery, there is no such thing as white privilege. In this kind of slavery, it is a given that one simply moves ahead in this life through a meritocratic pursuit of hard work, dedication, and vigilance. It is a given that everyone has the same chances and opportunities as everyone else.
In this kind of slavery, being called “racist” is, somehow, a racist thing, because in this kind of slavery, race doesn’t exist, we should all be color-blind, and anyone who even hints that there are inequalities between whites and blacks are the actual racists.
In this kind of slavery, the Black Lives Matter movement is racist because, of course, all lives matter, not just black lives. In this kind of slavery, people who think this honestly believe that people who support Black Lives Matter honestly believe that all lives don’t matter, that white lives don’t matter, that blue lives don’t matter.
It is this kind of slavery that is harder to abolish. We can, and have, enacted laws and constitutional amendments and created policies to end slavery in this country. We must fight to end the slavery of sex workers and human trafficking and economic slavery that still affects millions of people globally. It won’t be easy, but it will be doable. Abolishing slavery of the mind---the chains of hatred and prejudice that bind some people---will, however, be far more difficult to eradicate.
Imagine a world, however, in which slavery in the U.S. was not abolished. Imagine it is the year 2016, and four Southern states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Carolina (the north/south division never happened)---called the “Hard Four” by the North---still have slavery. Imagine a country in which the economy and the GNP and the success of the dollar in world markets is sustained by this institutionalized slavery.
This world has been envisioned, believably and terrifyingly, by Ben H. Winters in his novel “Underground Airlines”.
The protagonist of “UA” is named Victor, although that’s not his real name. Indeed, he has used so many aliases that he can barely remember the name given to him by the birthing center in which he was born. Victor was a slave. He successfully ran away from his plantation when he was younger, but he was captured by the federal government and put to use by the U.S. Marshalls Service, which oversees the capture and re-processing of runaways. Being black, Victor can get into places that white men can’t, and he can infiltrate groups suspected of harboring runaways for shipment to free countries like Canada or Britain.
His latest assignment is the search for a young runaway named Jackdaw, who has supposedly made his way successfully to Indiana with the help of the Underground Airlines.
Things are fishy from the start, though. The official report given to Victor to study is full of holes, holes that shouldn’t be there. Something about this case gnaws at him, and he begins to play detective against both sides, the Underground Airlines and the U.S. Marshalls.
What he discovers could rock the nation to its core. It could start the process of hope and change for black slaves in the Hard Four. Or he could do nothing, because he has a pretty good gig with the feds. It may not be freedom, but it’s stability, and taking the information to the proper groups---the abolitionists---could threaten that lifestyle.
Victor is a believable hero because he is a reluctant one, and, to some extent, an unreliable one.
“UA” is that rarest of excellent science fiction novels. It’s an alternative universe novel that immerses the reader so deeply into its universe that it ceases to be an alternative one. It suspends one’s disbelief so well that one will actually believe that slavery still exists, that the Civil Rights movement never happened, or at least was set back by about a hundred years, that black people have it worse, in 2016, than they did in the 1960s.
Actually, that is all too easy to believe.
Winters has written a suspenseful sci-fi thriller, incorporating a frightening “what-if” political scenario replete with a full alternate history of the United States: what if Lincoln had been assassinated long before the Civil War began, what if the Civil War never happened, what if the Fifteenth Amendment was never added to the Constitution?
It’s hard to believe that, in 2016, a group like Black Lives Matter even exists or needs to exist, and yet it does. It is sadly more necessary than ever. Because slavery still exists, and I’m not talking about the millions who are actually enslaved around the world. That’s bad enough, and we should all be fighting to abolish it.
The slavery I’m talking about is one that we all, if we are honest with ourselves, suffer from: racism, overt or subtle. We are all racists, white or black, Hispanic or Asian. We are all shackled by the prejudices, beliefs, limitations and privileges that society ingrains in us from a young age, whether we are aware of them or not. It's only by confronting it that we have any chance of abolishing it....more
Abraham Lincoln is chic right now. I'm not sure why, but everybody and their uncle has felt the need to put in their two cents' worth to the growing nAbraham Lincoln is chic right now. I'm not sure why, but everybody and their uncle has felt the need to put in their two cents' worth to the growing number of Lincoln books currently on the bookshelves and bestseller lists. Most notably (in the non-fiction entry) are Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals", Bill O'Reilly's "Killing Lincoln", and James L. Swanson's "Manhunt". In the fiction arena, Lincoln has battled vampires in Seth Grahame-Smith's "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter" and, now, in Stephen L. Carter's science fictional re-imagining of history, Lincoln (who survived the gunshot wound at Ford theatre) faces an impeachment trial.
Carter, whose previous works have dealt with political conspiracies and murder mysteries, was clearly attracted to the potential fun he could have with the subject. And, he has more than succeeded. Carter, a Yale Law Professor and obvious history buff and a top-notch writer of elaborate thrillers, has written one of those books that is sure to appeal to everyone. For the sci-fi nerds, he has written an extremely plausible alternate history. For mystery lovers, he throws in a murder mystery in the first ten pages, and, for the womanfolk, he even has a love story. There is also a conspiracy plot involving secret codes and a courtroom drama. That Carter can weave all these elements together in a way that is immensely readable, entertaining, and fun is a testament to his talent as a writer.
The protagonist of the book, Abigail Canner, is a young black woman who happens to be a college graduate and a law clerk, two accomplishments for which she has had to fight, considering the time in which she lives. She is hired on by the same firm that has taken on the defense of Lincoln during his impeachment trial. While her sex and race often impede her from being a productive member of the firm, she finds ways to be useful. When one of the partners in the firm is found murdered outside a brothel with the body of a black woman, Abigail takes on the role of part-time detective, with the help of Jonathan Hilliman, one of the lawyers in the firm with whom she shares a mutual (unspoken) attraction. When she finds out that the woman, whom the police has dismissed as a mere prostitute, was involved in an underground political circle of anti-Lincoln conspirators, and that certain parties are searching frantically for a missing list of conspirators, Abigail and Jonathan quickly find themselves embroiled in a race against time (the trial against Lincoln is quickly coming to a close, and things do not look good for Lincoln) and powerful forces of the upper classes and the wealthy. Mixed in with all this, of course, is a fascinating courtroom drama in which Lincoln is held accountable for very real impeachable offenses.
As Carter states in an Afterword, Lincoln actually did do things which would have been considered grossly unconstitutional, such as shutting down newspapers, arresting opposition spokesmen, suspending habeas corpus, and refusing to recognize court orders of prisoner releases. He also did place certain cities in the North under martial law and forcibly shut down the Maryland legislature. History tends to forget that, at one point, Lincoln was the most hated man in America, even---and especially---by members of his own party. Who is to say how history would have played out if Lincoln had survived his assassination? Carter makes a compelling case. And an extremely entertaining one. ...more
Sometimes the best science fiction novels are the ones that you don't realize are science fiction novels until after you've read them. Michael Chabon'Sometimes the best science fiction novels are the ones that you don't realize are science fiction novels until after you've read them. Michael Chabon's clever, funny, and poignant novel "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" is one of those novels. Set in an alternative universe in which the state of Israel doesn't exist and Jewish refugees from Europe are forced to settle in a non-permanent province of Alaska called Sitka, "TYPU""follows the existence (it certainly can't be called a "life") of one Meyer Landsman, a washed-up middle-aged homicide detective. Divorced, alcoholic, and borderline suicidal, Landsman stumbles onto a mystery of global conspiracies when his neighbor, a quiet former chess prodigy who may have been the Messiah, is found murdered. With the help of his partner, a half-Tlingit named Berko, Landsman reluctantly but heroically attempts to find the killer. He also, along the way, hopes to patch up things with his ex-wife (with whom he is still in love), but it may be a problem as she is his boss. A great murder mystery and a touching love story, with a lot of humorous and thought-provoking social commentary make this another win for Chabon. Fans of Chabon's earlier works, such as "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", will surely enjoy this one. ...more
Philip K. Dick is one of those names in the science fiction world that elicits a wide range of reactions from people.
Having only read a handful of soPhilip K. Dick is one of those names in the science fiction world that elicits a wide range of reactions from people.
Having only read a handful of some of his stuff, mostly short fiction, I can't quite say with any certainty whether I agree with his cadre of uber-fans that he is the Greatest SF Writer Ever. I also can't agree with his detractors who think he is a talentless hack.
I will say, however, that "The Man in the High Castle" deserves a place amongst the canon of great science fiction novels, both for its writing and its ideas.
Essentially an alternate-history (political) science fiction novel, the book takes place in the decade following the Second World War. The Allies lost, and what used to be the United States is divided up amongst Japan and Germany.
Jews, homosexuals, blacks, the disabled, and the politically subversive are forced to flee to Canada or South America (the last remaining areas of freedom and democracy) or suffer in the many concentration camps popping up across what was once the continental U.S.
What's interesting about this novel is that Dick does something rather unexpected: he shows how quickly and easily former Americans are at adapting with and becoming comfortable with their new Nazi or Japanese rulers.
Granted, beneath the surface calm is a growing resentment and insurrectionist movement, but the main characters in the novel are all, for the most part, just trying to live the normal lives they were living prior to and during the war.
Dick is clearly illustrating how malleable the human mind is to shifting paradigms of reality. I guess it's no different than how quickly Germans and Japanese adapted to the American and British occupations following the war.
The theme of shifting reality and questioning what is truly "real" and what is "unreal", an oft-used theme in Dick's fiction, is at the forefront in this fascinating novel.
If you, like me, have never read a Philip Dick novel before, this may be a good one to start with....more
This is the book that apparently started the whole steam-punk genre, and I can kind of see why steam-punk is so popular.
"The Difference Engine" has aThis is the book that apparently started the whole steam-punk genre, and I can kind of see why steam-punk is so popular.
"The Difference Engine" has a fascinating premise: What if the computer age had happened roughly 100 years before it actually did? Part alternate-history sci-fi and part cyberpunk set in the Victorian era, "The Difference Engine" is a fascinating glimpse at a weird alternate universe that bares more resemblance to the 21st century than I think most of us would care to admit.
In the world of this book, England is one of the world's greatest Superpowers (it has created and perfected the world's largest and most powerful super-computer) along with France, as the North American continent is a hotbed of unrest and constant warring between the separate countries of the American Union, the Confederacy, Texas, and California.
Japan is slowly breaking out of its isolationist shell to become another superpower, allied with England. Meanwhile, underground Luddite (anti-technology) insurrectionists plan to destroy English society, which they feel has become a moral cesspool because of everyone's reliance on technology and information.
Interesting, too, that co-authors Bruce Sterling and William Gibson published this novel in the early '90s, long before the Internet had a chokehold on the world. I'm not a total Luddite (and I'm sure Sterling and Gibson aren't either), but their depiction of a world that appears to be falling apart at the seams (thanks in no small way to a technology that was probably intended to make life easier and better) is frighteningly prophetic. ...more
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