New Scientist Column: Kim Stanley Robinson and Gwyneth Jones

My latest column at The New Scientist looks at two novels that try to imagine how society will order itself in the wake of environmental and economic collapse.  Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 imagines the titular city as a high-tech Venice, where a quasi-socialist community has arisen in the vacuum left behind when finance retreated, and must now defend itself as the forces of gentrification once again sniff out a profit to be made in the newly hip and livable canalized city.  It's been interesting to watch the reviews for this book pour in: Gerry Canavan at LARB, for example, wonders if it represents the shattering of Robinson's famed optimism, while Joshua Rothman at the New Yorker, and John Clute in Strange Horizons, see the book's vision of a city that survives and even flourishes in the wake of climate change as an inherently hopeful one.  I think that tension is entirely intentional--New York 2140 is a book that isn't entirely certain whether the future it imagines is a good one, and whether the survival it posits is something to celebrate or mourn.

Proof of Concept is a great deal less ambivalent about its future, in which most of humanity lives in cramped, heavily-policed enclaves while the rest of the planet is a polluted wasteland.  A group of scientists enter enforced isolation, supposedly to study a potential form of faster-than-light travel, but also as a form of reality TV that is a primary form of entertainment in a world that loves dreaming about an "escape ticket".  As you'd expect with Jones, everything is a lot weirder than even that premise might suggest, with the novella juggling so many balls that one could easily imagine it being fleshed out into a full-length novel.  It's amazing to think that we haven't had a new work from Jones in nearly a decade, and I hope that Proof of Concept is a sign of things to come, though as a work in its own right it feels incomplete (Paul Kincaid comes to similar conclusions at Strange Horizons).

2016, A Year in Reading: Best Reads of the Year

I read 93 books in 2016.  For a while I thought I'd make it to a hundred, but no matter--this is still a huge leap, one more book, in fact, than I read in 2015 and 2014 put together.  I wish I could put my finger on just why my reading this year made such tremendous strides.  Part of the reason is purely practical--I read a great deal of comics this year, and no small amount of YA and single-volume anthologies, and these all made for rather quick reads.  But I also feel like I've broken through a wall with my reading--with identifying books I'd like to read and am likely to enjoy, and with organizing my reading so that I'm not overwhelmed by too many heavy books, or too many trivial ones, and end up feeling dispirited and not willing to crack open another cover.  This was particularly surprising when you consider that 2016 was the year I broke my habit of not reading genre trilogies, or at least not carrying on with them past the first volume.  I read the first two volumes of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, and of Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe trilogy.  I read the last two volumes of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, as well as several starting volumes in trilogies that I probably won't be keeping up with.  As I've written (including later in this piece), there are problems with how SF is currently constructing its trilogies, and they're present in all of these books, but nevertheless I found a great deal to enjoy in each of them.

We'll have to see if I'm able to maintain the same rhythm in 2017, but in the meantime I'm glad to report that as well as delivering quantity, this year also delivered quality, with quite a few remarkable reads that stood out from the pack.  (As for bad reads, there were surprisingly few, though I'm sad to say that most of them were concentrated in this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist.)  As usual, presented in order of author's surname.

Best Books:

• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
  
  As I've written in my review of The Obelisk Gate, the sequel to this Hugo-winning marvel, there's a longer conversation to be had about how the genre is currently constructing its trilogies, and how the result tends to be front-loading a lot of worldbuilding information in the first volume in a way that leaves the later ones shapeless.  Even acknowledging that problem, however, there's no denying that the way in which The Fifth Season introduces us to its world and its characters is instantly compelling and fascinating.  Following the lives of three women in a world given to cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, whose power to control (and often exacerbate) these outbreaks is viewed with fear and hatred, The Fifth Season touches on so many topics that you can hardly believe that it works, much less works as well as it does.  This is a novel about how people are shaped by hardship: the hardship of knowing that catastrophe is always just around the corner, and the hardship of being hated, oppressed, and hunted for something you can't control.  It's a novel that takes some of the core tropes of the superhero genre (chiefly the X-Men stories) and exposes the cruelty and horror at their core--as well as tying them much more strongly to issues of race and racism than any previous attempt at the genre.  And it's a novel that effortlessly combines the tropes of epic fantasy and far-future, post-apocalypse SF into a stew that makes them all its own, and makes discussing its genre a delight in its own right (I still maintain that its absence from next year's Clarke shortlist will be a crime).  Whether or not the Broken Earth trilogy manages to stick the landing, The Fifth Season on its own is an important and impeccably structured work.
  
  
• The Vision (Volume 1: Little Worse Than a Man; Volume 2: Little Better Than a Beast) by Tom King, art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Michael Walsh
  
  If you'd told me a year ago that my favorite comic of 2016 would be a Marvel superhero comic, and that it would star that boring purple guy from Age of Ultron, I would never have believed you.  But here we are a year later, and there is no book I read this year that I'd like to evangelize for more than Tom King's run of The Vision.  King takes a well-worn premise--robot tries to live as human, with disastrous results--and executes it with a combination of hard-headedness and compassion that make the story's inevitable turn towards tragedy both fascinating and heartbreaking.  We know, from the outset, that the Vision's experiment in normalcy will end in carnage, but the family he constructs for himself--wife Virginia and twin teenagers Vin and Viv--are so instantly winning, despite or perhaps even because they share their father's stiff mannerisms and tendency to be over-literal, that you can't help but wish for them to find a way to exist in a world that they are so unsuited for.  The second half of the story, which involves more of the Avengers, is less gripping, but it also brings in one of the core questions of the superhero genre, one that is seldom handled with the seriousness it deserves.  So many characters in this genre are created for a purpose, whether good or evil, and their stories revolve around rejecting, embracing, or failing to fight off that purpose.  King asks the much more important question: not whether the Vision or his family are doomed to be bad guys or good guys, but whether any of them can ever simply be people.
  
  
• Wake by Elizabeth Knox
  
  The endlessly-reinventing Knox's latest novel conjures the ghost of Stephen King, but only to rebuke him for a lack of imagination and grit.  In Knox's story, when a group of strangers are stranded together by a breakdown of the laws of rationality and order, the danger they face isn't man's inhumanity to man.  On the contrary, it's the insistence that they continue to behave like human beings, even in the face of the impossible and of their own looming surrender to it, that drives our heroes to the breaking point.  The are forced to confront the question: is it better to face death as a community, or to shirk off the obligations they feel towards one another and die unencumbered?  In the meantime, Knox delivers an impeccable work of horror, one that ranges from the existential to the scatological, and which finds tension and anxiety in the most mundane details of survival.
  
  
• Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
  
  I'm not being terribly original in highlighting Rankine's book of poetry, and indeed so many of the ideas she raises here have become bywords of the Black Lives Matter movement that finding them here often felt more like encountering an old friend in an unfamiliar environment.  But the clarity of the ideas that Rankine expresses--even in a medium that is often known for its obliqueness like poetry, and even in her own chosen form, which is often more like linked, short essays--is startling.  Citizen is about many things, as it tries to grapple with the reality of life for African-Americans in the present moment.  But what struck me about it during my first reading was Rankine's struggle with anger, as an artist, a person, and specifically a black woman.  Anger is essential to how Rankine sees the world, and it only grows as the list of black men, women, and children victimized and often murdered by the police grows longer.  It is a righteous anger, and one that she is right to express.  But at the same time, she is also aware of how anger can consume, and make it impossible to live and to create.  It's not a simple question--for all that people, and especially privileged people, like to treat it as such--and Rankine's handling of it in this book is far from simplistic.  Drawing on her own life, and on examples of other black people in the public eye who struggle with the same question of anger, she produces a philosophical treatise that is all the more powerful for not being able to come to an answer.
  
  
• The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar (review)
  
  I wrote several thousand words about Samatar's second novel, the companion piece to her equally wonderful A Stranger in Olondria, earlier this year, and yet I still don't feel that I've fully grappled with how special and revolutionary this book is.  This despite the fact that Histories initially feels a great deal more conventional, and much easier to sum up, than Olondria.  Its use of familiar epic fantasy tropes and styles is more pronounced than the previous novel, and whereas Olondria circled around the edges of a fantasyland civil war, Histories sets its story almost in the middle of it.  What ultimately becomes clear, however, is that just like the hero of A Stranger in Olondria, the four women who tell the story of The Winged Histories are trying to give shape to their lives by casting them into literary forms--in this case, the forms of epic fantasy, even if none of them are aware of that genre or would call it that.  And, one by one, they discover the limitations of those forms, especially where women and colonized people are concerned.  Not unlike Olondria, The Winged Histories is ultimately forced to ask whether it is even possible for people to tell their own stories using the tropes and tools left to them by their oppressors.  If the entire purpose of your existence is to be the Other, or the object, in someone else's story, can you ever take their words, their forms, and make it a story about yourself?  For most of the novel's characters, the solution is ultimately to fall silent, and yet The Winged Histories itself rings loudly.  As much as it is a rebuke of the fantasy genre, it is also a major work within it, and one that deserves more discussion and attention than it has received.

Honorable Mentions:

• White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi - A haunted house story with a twist, in which the ghost of racism and xenophobia infects the present generation and must be exorcised.
  
  
• Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson - A bleak counterpoint to Robinson's freewheeling 2312, which warns against dreaming of a home in the stars and neglecting the one we have here.
  
  
• Natural History by Justina Robson - A space opera whose setting is a sort of stepping stone to Banks's Culture, with AIs and living ships organizing in pursuit of self-determination.
  
  
• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (review) - A historical novel that refuses the comfortable (albeit horrific) embrace of the past, reminding us that history is happening right now.
  
  
• The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson - A rude, rambunctious reminder that epic fantasy is capable of so much more than we give it credit for.

Recent Reading Roundup 41

It's been a little quiet on this blog over the summer, mainly because I've been busy with various projects for other venues (for example the Clarke shortlist review).  But also, because I've been busy reading.  A lot.  2016 is shaping up to be one of--if not the--most prolific reading years of my life.  Quality-wise, it's also been very rewarding, and though my other writing prevented me from giving some of these books the more in-depth look they deserved, this is still an impressive bunch of books, and worth a closer look.

• 
  Uprooted by Naomi Novik - Novik's Nebula-winning, Hugo-nominated novel--her first standalone after a decade with the His Majesty's Dragon series--has echoes of Howl's Moving Castle and Seraphina, and stands up reasonably well alongside those antecedents.  In a thinly-glossed, cod-medieval Eastern Europe, a wizard known as the Dragon exacts a mysterious but unrelenting tribute from the residents of the villages that border the malevolent, magical Wood.  Every ten years, he selects a seventeen-year-old girl to live in his tower and serve him.  The girls always return, unharmed, claiming to be unmolested, and handsomely paid, but they also always leave soon after, cut off from their families and communities.  The villagers tolerate this custom because the Dragon protects them from the predations of the Wood, which encroaches further every year, contaminating food and water and occasionally stealing people, who return (if they do at all) altered and sinister.  Heroine Agnieszka is of an age to be chosen by the Dragon, but she, like all her neighbors, believes that it's her beautiful, brave, talented best friend Kasia who will be taken.  When the Dragon takes Agnieszka instead, he reveals that it's because she has magical power, which he is legally bound to train.  But Agnieszka's training soon gives way to the demands of the real world, as the cold war with the Wood heats up, and threatens to engulf the entire nation.
  
  What works best about Uprooted is the way that Novik combines her obvious inspirations in Eastern European folk tales (including liberal references to Baba Yaga) with a carefully worked out fantasy world.  The most exciting parts of the novel are when Agnieszka and the Dragon learn to combine their magical approaches (somewhat predictably--and a little annoyingly, to my tastes--his magic is scientific and methodical, whereas hers is intuitive and rooted in nature) and come up with tools with which they can fight the Wood's increasingly complicated attacks.  The Wood itself is a fascinating and terrifying opponent, both for its corrupting effect on people, animals, and places, and for the obvious intelligence driving its tactics.  A sequence in which Agnieszka and the Dragon are compelled by an adventurous prince to accompany him into the Wood in order to rescue his kidnapped mother is tense and hair-raising, and Novik does a good line in pulse-pounding action storytelling.  Also rewarding is the fact that the book does not abandon the relationship between Agnieszka and Kasia after their separation, and that the two girls remain each other's strongest supporters even as they both undergo profound changes and take on bewildering responsibilities.  Like Seraphina, Uprooted takes the attitude that the only thing to do with a heroine who turns out to have super-special, super-awesome powers is to pile her high with increasingly challenging responsibilities, constantly raising the stakes every time she manages to solve a seemingly impossible problem.  But it's nice that alongside that refreshing unwillingness to be in awe of its own heroine, Uprooted also gives her someone who is always in her corner, and that that someone is also a girl.
  
  If I have one reservation about Uprooted (aside from the way that the novel's breakneck plot loses focus a little as it approaches its climax), it is with the central romance.  On one level, there is nothing here to complain about--Uprooted is as much a romance novel as a fantasy novel, and it does a good job of establishing not just the emotional but the physical attraction between Agnieszka and the Dragon, so much that it will be a rare reader who finishes the novel not feeling desperate for these two crazy kids to make it work.  But at the same time, the Dragon is also the same person who has spent a century abducting and abusing--emotionally, if not physically or sexually--teenage girls, and the book doesn't do quite enough to bring him back from this.  It is, perhaps, to Novik's credit that she doesn't delve into the Dragon's tragic past and blighted love life to justify his arrogant, high-handed behavior--she recognizes that nothing that he's suffered justifies the suffering he's caused.  But at times that approach feels undeservedly forgiving, as if it's enough for Agnieszka to point out to the Dragon that he's caused a great deal of pain, and this will make it alright for her to end up with him, because he's agreed not to do it any more.  It's not quite enough to mar the book's ending--as I say, you do end up rooting for this romance--but I get the feeling that Novik was trying to buck some of the more poisonous conventions of the romance genre, and I don't think she's done quite enough to achieve that.
  
  
• Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie - I've mentioned before that I've gotten in the habit of reading the first volume in a trilogy, enjoying it well enough, and then never getting around to reading the concluding volumes, because there are so many other, in some cases standalone, books to attend to that who has the time.  If it hadn't been for my desire to get a good grounding in this year's Hugo-nominated novels, I might have done the same with the final two volumes of Leckie's massively successful series, and though I enjoyed both books, I'm not sure that they're enough to get me to change my habits--while both elaborate on the ideas and the world introduced in Ancillary Justice, neither one adds enough to it to justify their existence on their own merits.
  
  
  
  My understanding is that a lot of readers were disappointed in Ancillary Sword, and one can see why given that it suffers from pretty classic middle book problems (another reason, in my experience, to avoid trilogies--if 33% of your experience is going to be stage-setting, you might as well stick with standalones).  But it also does a great deal that I ended up appreciating in its own right, as distinct from the series's overarching story.  The book, which sees former ship's AI turned individual turned ship's captain Breq dispatched to a system with strategic importance to the Imperial Radch, in order to hold it for the "right" version of the tyrant Anaander Mianaai, an individual distributed over many bodies who has experienced a schism within themselves, leans very heavily on the novel of manners aspect of the story, an important component of a lot of space opera that doesn't get nearly enough play in most discussions of the genre.  Most of the novel is concerned with internal politics on Breq's ship, diplomatic maneuvers with the officials she meets in the system, and negotiations with various interest groups among the local population.  It's all done with the same light touch and wry sense of humor that characterized Ancillary Justice, but besides being a fun, breezy read, it's nice to see a novel about the running of a gigantic space empire that recognizes that a lot--the vast and overwhelming majority, in fact--of the work that goes into keeping such an edifice going involves talking.
  
  One of the things that Ancillary Sword gets to highlight, now that Breq is in a position of authority, is how much of a role language plays in maintaining and reinforcing the imperial project.  By classifying certain people as uncivilized, illegal, or unapproved, the empire's officers ensure that they can never be anything else, because that very designation ensures that they will never have access to the tools that will allow them to climb the ladder of ranks that supposedly gives every citizen of the empire a fair shake.  Breq tries to act as a force of justice, to point out the rhetorical tricks by which the empire blinds even its diligent and conscientious officers to the injustice they're perpetuating.  But even she ends up functioning as a tool of oppression, for example when she uncovers an assassination plot, and hands the perpetrators over to justice even though she knows that the less privileged, and less guilty, of the two will get a harsher sentence.
  
  
  
  When the story moves on to Ancillary Mercy, however, these issues turn out to be, well, not exactly ancillary to Leckie's project, but a lot less important than I would have liked.  Mercy picks up from the relative doldrums of Sword and places Breq at the center of a military dispute between the different factions of Anaander Mianaai, with much of the population of the system at stake.  It's here that the series's polite, mannered tone starts to work against it--Breq's ability to find a way through the tangle of conflicting interests that threaten to destroy her, her ship, and her crew feels, by the end of the novel, a little magical.  This is a particular problem when it comes to the novel's main concern, the rights of AIs to self-determination.  When human characters point out to Breq that the ships and stations that house AIs are responsible for the lives of thousands of people, and that giving them total freedom could endanger those residents, her response is to insist that ships love their crew and would never hurt them.  Which may be true, in the series's world, but if so it reinforces the feeling that the Ancillary books can sometimes be a little too nice for their own good--that the underlying assumptions of their world make it difficult to say meaningful things about the problems of empire.  Ancillary Mercy is just as charming and engaging as the previous two volumes in the series, but in some ways this is precisely its problem--it can't quite earn the ending that Leckie has been aiming at for three books.
  
  
• 
  The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin - I wish I had a bit more time on my hands to write a proper, full-length review of this book, the recent and richly-deserved Hugo winner.  Then I might have some chance of doing justice to all the many remarkable things it does.  Near the top of the list would be the way that Jemisin balances so many tropes and genres--epic fantasy, Dying Earth SF, post-apocalypse, X-Men-style persecuted superheroes--and combines them into a whole that is not only coherent and effortlessly readable, but often quite poetic.  Set in a world called the Stillness that has already experienced several industrial flowerings and collapses, and which is currently riven by massive geological instability--which periodically leads to supervolcano eruptions and subsequent years-long winters due to ash in the atmosphere, the "fifth season" of the title--the book follows three heroines who possess a superpower that allows them to control the vibrations of the earth, to quell quakes and volcanoes--or to unleash them.  Damaya is a "feral," a child whose gift for "orogeny" appeared unexpectedly in her family, and who is surrendered to the Fulcrum, the organization that trains and controls orogenes, in part because her parents know that people like her are so feared and reviled that her life would be in danger if she stayed in their community.  Syenite is an adept at the Fulcrum, who is dispatched on a mission with Alabaster, one of the most skilled orogenes alive, with orders to conceive a child with him, thus furthering his bloodline.  Essun is an escapee from the Fulcrum who has lived hidden in a remote community for years.  As the book begins, her husband discovers her secret and murders one of their children, kidnapping the other.  Essun sets out after him, in hopes of retrieving her missing daughter, and of revenge.
  
  Through the three women's eyes, Jemisin weaves a portrait of a civilization defined by its awareness of its own impermanence.  With quakes and fifth seasons an inevitability, all of society is structured to survive catastrophe, and Jemisin is great at capturing the nuances of how that would affect even the most minute aspects of life, and the habits of thought of all of the Stillness's inhabitants.  Constant apocalypses mean that societies in the Stillness don't tend to climb very far up the technological ladder, but their approach to this is interestingly hard-headed--low technology is survivable technology, the kind that can withstand and carry a civilization through a fifth season, and characters in the book are full of disdain towards more advanced "deadcivs" whose inability to weather these stresses is proof, in their mind, that their approach was the wrong one.  As a result, much of the book's society feels typical of epic fantasy, but Jemisin works to demystify it, stressing things like bureaucracy, the structures of civic government, and all the tedious work that goes into making such a society function, which make the entire novel feel a lot more modern and of the moment than it otherwise might have.  (In that sense, it reminded me a great deal of Sofia Samatar's The Winged Histories, which in turn feels inspired by Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, a line of influence that might be worth investigating further.)
  
  The theme of necessity warping thought processes can also be observed in the reaction to orogenes, and more importantly, in how they are taught to see themselves.  The Stillness both needs and desperately fears orogens, and though both of these reactions are understandable--over the course of the novel, we witness orogenes, driven by anger and grief, causing destruction that claims the lives of millions of people--the mechanisms that it has created in order to control them are horrific.  Orogenes are taught that the Fulcrum is the only place where they can be safe and themselves, but these privileges come with a price--think a twisted (or perhaps more realistic) version of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.  Within the Fulcrum, orogenes are subjected to psychological and physical abuse (and, if you count Syenite and Alabaster's forced breeding, sexual as well), designed to stamp out their independence and free will.  Their lives are circumscribed by Guardians, who form twisted bonds of mingled control and affection with their charges, the better to isolate them from the world and ensure that they never make decisions on their own.  Orogenes are taught to seek control above all things--any indication that they might be slipping in this respect is cause for punishment or even destruction--and at the same time, they have no control over their own lives.  One of the chief accomplishments of this novel is how it conveys the psychological effects of this conditioning--at three different points in life--and the way that it inevitably leads the orogenes to participate in their own oppression, not just because they fear the Guardians, but because they crave their approval, and believe that the only way to achieve something resembling freedom is to play along with the system.
  
  All three women end up pushing against the system that has confined and abused them, in different ways that nevertheless lead them, inevitably, to an exploration of different ways of ordering society which do not depend on the exploitation and oppression of orogenes, and to an investigation into the nature of orogeny and the reasons for the Stillness's instability.  It's that latter point--though its execution is typically excellent--that leaves me a little worried about future volumes in this projected trilogy.  Despite the momentous events it describes, and the hard work it puts into building its world, The Fifth Season is largely a character-based novel, an exploration of the ways in which abuse and oppression warp the soul, and of the corrosive effects that repeated grief and loss can have over even well-meaning people.  But it is also, very clearly, a novel of setup, whose purpose is to bring its heroines to a particular point so that the story proper can begin.  I'm a little less interested in the promised next phase of this story, already teased in the novel's closing chapters, in which Essun explores hidden cities, investigates her power over the mysterious remnants of ancient technology left in her world, and meets what appear to be aliens (it doesn't help that it's in these chapters that the book's ironclad control over its pace and structure goes a little wobbly; too many secondary characters just happen to show up at the same place and time, and too many new concepts are introduced at once, in a way that's clearly designed to set up the sequel, not service the current volume's story).  Still, The Fifth Season is so accomplished, so well done, and such a pleasure to read, that I would be a fool not to break my own habit, and commit right now to keeping up with this series.
  
  
• 
  The Vision, Vol. 1: Little Worse Than a Man by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta - The biggest deal in Marvel comics this year, at least for people like myself who aren't regular comics readers and know the company's universe mostly from the MCU, is Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther.  I'm looking forward to the first trade collection of that story, but in the meantime, I wish a little more attention were being paid to King's new run of The Vision, which is absolutely a story that SF fans should be flocking to.  io9 highlighted it a few weeks ago, which is why I ended up picking it up, but I'd like to see more discussion of this story, in which the eponymous purple synthezoid makes himself a family, complete with wife and twin teenage children, and moves them to the suburbs.  The actual plot is hardly original--robot tries to be human, with disastrous results--but the execution is flawless, resulting in a story that is sad, creepy, and disturbing.  We're told from the outset that the Vision's experiment in normalcy will end in tragedy and death, but the terms in which that story is related, as the Visions keep making decisions that might make sense in the moment, but which quickly snowball into awfulness, are refreshingly undramatic.  The Vision's own clear-headed, rational way of seeing the world informs King's storytelling, even as he and his family keep making choices that are completely irrational in order to protect themselves and each other, and this gives the story a force it might not have had if it had taken the more obvious approach of melodramatic grimdark.  (Walta's art, which confines the story's increasingly deranged events into neat panels, helps to convey the sense of a normalcy that is stifling rather than relaxing.)  In the end, we're left to wonder: did the Vision's experiment fail because he and his family are too different from humans, or because they are too like us?
  
  I'm less enthusiastic about the story's final turn, which brings in the Avengers and a potentially world-destroying calamity, and heralds a more conventional direction for the next volume.  But taken on its own, Little Worse Than a Man is brilliantly bleak piece of SF storytelling, that finally does something interesting with a character whose movie incarnation I've found rather pointless.
  
  
• 
  Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson - Robinson's latest feels of a piece with his 2012 novel 2312, first in the sense that they seem to take place, more or less, in the same continuity (though Aurora is set several centuries later), and second because they're told in a similar combination of the personal and the technical, with passages from the point of view of human characters interspersed with long segments from the point of view of the AI of a generation ship, who narrates events on the ship with journalistic detachment, and a strong focus of the scientific and engineering challenges of keeping the ship and its inhabitants going over the centuries.  But despite their similar approaches, Aurora has a very different feel from 2312, precisely because of the difference in their settings.  2312 was a freewheeling grand tour of a colonized solar system.  It delighted in jumping from one location to another, showing off the outlandish ways in which humans had figured out how to live on nearly every rock in our system, and interspersed its narrative with news clippings and encyclopedia entries that showed off the richness and diversity of human experience in this setting.  Aurora, in contrast, is deliberately constricted.  Whether they realize it or not, its characters are trapped in a tiny, make-believe world that is warping them in a million tiny yet noticeable ways--from skewing their evolution, to constantly threatening to collapse their living environment, to depositing them on a dead world that may be even more dangerous than the centuries-long journey they've made to it.
  
  Aurora is a bleak novel, and it has been accused in some quarters of being tendentious--or arguing and in fact skewing its argument towards the conclusion that the exploration and colonization of deep space are a fool's errand.  Without regular contact with the planet on which they evolved and for which they are perfectly suited, the book's characters discover, their civilization falls prey to a host of poorly understood disorders that leave them physiologically and psychologically scarred.  More importantly, they end up feeling robbed and used, the pawns in a megalomaniacal project to colonize the galaxy that never took into account the human cost of such a project.  Aurora ends up treating the architects of generation ships (and the people in the present who, despite the failure of the story's mission, still insist that it is humanity's ordained fate to colonize the stars) as callous fools, who cavalierly dismiss the suffering, starvation, and death endured by the would-be colonists as an acceptable cost for a prize that might never be achieved.  It's not an easy read--the combination of a bleak, claustrophobic tone with characters who ultimately have very little control over their lives, and whose only triumph comes from admitting defeat and giving up on the mission they inherited, makes for a slow, halting reading experience.  But it's also one of Robinson's most soulful and thought-provoking novels, a work whose main concern is trying to get at the connection between humans and their environment--a connection which, Robinson argues, can't be replicated in an artificial world, or an alien one.

The 2013 Clarke Award Shortlist Reviewed + SpecFic '12

This evening will see the announcement of the winner of the 2013 Clarke Award, after the more than normally contentious response to this year's shortlist.  At Strange Horizons, I take on the traditional task of reviewing the shortlist (in two parts)--for the first time since 2008, which means I've had five years to forget how exhausting a task this is, but also how much fun.  At the Strange Horizons blog, Niall Harrison has collected other reviews of the nominated books (including several others from Strange Horizons), as well as the various responses to the shortlist that have appeared in the last month (in three parts).

In other self-promotion news, my review of Frances Hardinge's A Face Like Glass was selected to appear in the inaugural volume of SpecFic, a series seeking to highlight online genre criticism, with the first volume edited by Justin Landon and Jared Shurin (as were several Strange Horizons reviews).  A full list of contributors can be found here, and the book itself can be purchased here, with proceeds going to the charity Room to Read.  SpecFic '13 is already in the works, and if you'd like to suggest works for that anthology, editors Ana Grilo and Thea James have set up a website--my first (and admittedly, not terribly original) choices are Sophia McDougall's utterly essential "The Rape of James," which I'll be referring to from now whenever the question of "realism" in grimdark fantasy crops up, and Jonathan McCalmont's "How to Fix (Discussion of) the Hugo Awards," which says a lot of what I would have said about this year's Hugo nominations, and the depressingly toxic conversation that has emerged around them, if I'd had the energy to wade into it.

Recent Reading Roundup 9

1. Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers - the second Wimsey/Vane novel puts the two characters on a more or less equal footing, both in terms of their dominance over the narrative and in terms of their contribution to the investigation of the mystery--the murder of a professional dancer on a secluded beach. This is a more complicated story than Strong Poison, with a great many elements--eye-witness accounts, forensic evidence, common deduction--coming together to form a coherent picture of the murder like so many puzzle pieces (all the while, of course, Sayers is holding back the final, crucial piece). The result is clever, if at times too deliberately so--the timeline of events surrounding the murder is crucial right down to the minute, so Sayers makes all of the relevant characters compulsive about accurate time-keeping (three or four different characters take trouble to assure the detectives that they reset their watches every morning according to the radio clock, which, please)--to the point that one begins to see Wimsey and Vane as rather ghoulish creatures, more interested in demonstrating their intelligence than in solving a brutal killing. My only real complaint about the novel, however, has to do with its ending and the rapid tone shift it makes from chipper to grim. Two paragraphs from the end, we discover that, although the murder has been solved, there isn't enough evidence to arrest the killer. The end. There isn't enough room to process this miscarriage of justice, and I put the book aside feeling a bit whip-lashed.
2. The Wrong Case by James Crumley - Crumley is the author of The Last Good Kiss, by far the finest mystery novel I've ever read, and I was therefore a little nervous about making another foray into his bibliography. The Wrong Case isn't quite as good as Kiss--not as focused in either plot or characterization--but it is a damn fine novel, and yet another example of how the noir detective genre can successfully be transplanted to a more modern era--in this case, the mid-seventies--and of how a canny writer can manipulate the genre's trappings to reflect his own moral and political agenda. The novel begins with the traditional noir opening--a beautiful, mysterious woman comes to our detective with a seemingly simple problem--and almost immediately derails. Crumley is more interested in sketching the portrait of a small town going to seed, and in describing its least fortunate inhabitants--drunks, aging hippies, runaways, failed mobsters--than in solving a mystery, and a significant portion of the novel is taken up with following the detective--Milo Milodragovitch, the unhappy, permanently drunk scion of an influential family--as he bounces from bar to bar, meeting up with friends and acquaintances, telling us their life stories (as well as the history of his own family) and making several half-hearted attempted to go straight and make something of himself. Most noir assumes that everyone is corrupt (including the detective) and damns them for it. In The Wrong Case, Crumley assumes that everyone is corrupt and pities them for it, and the result is a novel that is at the same time tragic and kind, a heartfelt, loving ode to weakness and despair and to the people overcome by both.
3. Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks - it seems that third time was the charm for me and Mr. Banks. The Algebraist was fun but ultimately inconsequential. Consider Phlebas had plenty to say and went about saying it for several hundred pages longer than it had to. Feersum Endjinn strikes just the right balance between whimsy and seriousness, and describes its fanciful far future with an admirable economy of words. There's a tremendous wealth of detail here, including the greatest city on Earth, a castle built on a gigantic scale--the heads of gargoyles are hollowed out and made into houses, and wars are fought between the clan situated in the great hall and the one in control of the chapel--and a virtual reality as complicated and as unpredictable as the real one, which has grown dangerous and corrupt with the passage of time and which doubles as an afterlife for the inhabitants of the city. Banks introduces us to this strange future and its intricacies with an admirable elegance, all the time moving forward with an intricate plot--four, in fact, one for each of the novel's main characters. Feersum Endjinn proceeds towards its climax with an almost geometric precision, and therein lies the novel's only fault--after so much build-up, after so much careful work, we expect the coming together of the novel's plotlines to be explosive. Instead, it is clever, neat, and not a little bit mannered--satisfying, but not as much as it might have been. Nevertheless, Feersum Endjinn is a fantastic read, and I will definitely be picking up more of Banks' writing.
4. Y: The Last Man, Volume 1: Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughn and Lucifer, Volume 1: Devil in the Gateway by Mike Carey - it's been two years now since I finished reading Sandman and I think it's time, after several successful and not-so-successful forays into standalone graphic novels, to make another stab at a serial. Vaughn and Carey's work has been getting a lot of good press, and although both volumes have some obvious teething problems, I can definitely see myself continuing with both stories. I approached Y: The Last Man with some trepidation--one can only imagine the many ways in which a male comic book writer could make a story about a world populated (almost) entirely by women unspeakably offensive. For the most part, I think Vaughn dodges the bullet--although the choice to have the first woman to recognize that all the men on the planet have died do so as she's putting a gun to her head was, perhaps, an unfortunate one. In fact, in some cases I get the impression that he was trying to hard to avoid or actively contradict stereotypes, including those too obvious or too silly to warrant acknowledgment (are there really people on the planet who still think that all women are pacifists?), and his depiction of Israelis had me alternately cringing and laughing uncontrollably. What I truly liked about Y, however, were the characters--last-man-on-Earth Yorick Brown and his protector Agent 355--which, this early in the story, is what should be happening, and more than enough inducement to pick up the next installment in the series.
   
   Lucifer builds on a character introduced in Sandman--the lord of hell who packed up shop and went off to bum on beach in Australia and, later, play piano in a trendy LA bar. The first volume is, perhaps inevitably, somewhat Sandman-derived. Lucifer is sent on a quest by heaven, travels through realms of myth and mystery, and encounters creatures both magical and mundane while accompanied (somewhat unwillingly) by a young human who may turn out to have great power. There isn't yet the sense that the story is moving in its own direction, or trying to find its own tone. Still, being too much like Sandman isn't exactly the worst thing one can say about a story, and from what I've gathered the series takes on its own character pretty quickly.
5. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson - Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt remains one of the most interesting, thoughtfully constructed alternate histories I've ever read, and the Mars trilogy, which charts the colonization and terraforming of the red planet starting in the early 21st century, is allegedly his masterpiece. There's a lot to like here--Robinson's vision of how transportation to an alien environment both alters us and makes us more ourselves than ever is intricate and carefully thought-out. In the novel's earlier parts, he carefully charts the intense bonds and enmities that form between the member of the 'first hundred'--the scientists and engineers who establish the first human settlement on the planet. Later on, as human presence on Mars explodes, these same characters embody various, sometimes conflicting, approaches to creating a new sort of human community--the revolutionary, the pragmatist, the liberal, the mystic, the visionary, the conservationist. Unfortunately, the interesting political and philosophical plotlines are interspersed with far, far too much information about Martian geography and geology, descriptions of technology, and some extremely silly generalizations about nationalities (it's one thing to say that the Swiss tend to be more detail-oriented and anal than other nations, but they're not all like that, and so on in that vein with regard to Americans, Russians, Japanese, and, of course, Arabs--who are, for the most part, treated as a block instead of a conglomeration of ethnic groups). From what I've read, it seems that the two sequels--Green Mars and Blue Mars--step up the info-dumps and move away from political questions and towards political answers, of a very specific stripe. I somehow doubt I'll get around to them.