Review of Undertow by Elizabeth Bear

Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1976) is a (novella extended into a) novel that features an alien planet invaded by humanity and exploited for its resources, the natives forced into labor.  An open allegory regarding the United State’s involvement in Vietnam, it is a compact novel that remains focused on three main points throughout: corporate/political greed, respect for traditional cultures, and the need to find reconciliation between the two.  Elizabeth Bear’s 2007 Undertow is precisely the same story, but with additional focus on science fiction/fantasy concepts, added character viewpoints, and all upgraded for the 21 st century.

The Ranid peacefully inhabited Greene’s World, that is, until humanity colonized the water planet, discovered omelite, and put them to work extracting the valuable resource.  An amphibian species, the Ranid swim the great ocean of Greene’s World in harmony with the planet but are no match for the weapons and technology of the Charter Trade Company.  The Ranids who can remain in hiding do, but there is a significant portion pressganged into working the platforms and undersea tunnels mining the precious material. 

Review of Fools by Pat Cadigan

At the current point in humanity’s technological evolution, the body is largely plastic. We have no cure for cancer or the common cold, but if anyone wants bigger breasts, hair implanted, bones sculpted, fat sucked out, or many other types of cosmetic surgery, the body can be re-molded.  The brain, however, remains a mystery.  We have drugs to counteract some conditions and very specific types of brain surgeries are possible that do not immediately induce death (lobotomy!), but as a whole, altering personality, memory, interests, and other such aspects of the mind is simply not possible.  Pat Cadigan’s 1988 Fools imagines precisely this world of possibility—including all the little flaws and imperfections.  Miles beyond turning a penis into a vagina, what a world it is.

To say Cadigan’s vision of the future is a twisted version of reality is only the beginning.  Fools plays with actuality by shifting between reality and virtual reality, and further yet, realities within virtual reality.  Consciousness smeared across personal memory and the memories of others, self-developed skills and those implemented from others, and mind-to-mind and mind-to-machine connections, the combination is a milieu of mentality that must be read to be believed.  Not for the feint of heart, Cadigan slips the reader slowly into the waters of surreal consciousness, but once they’re in, it’s head to toe, the world taking on a dreamscape hue. (But do ignore the cover.)

Non-Fiction: Review of Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene

I think it’s fair to say most everyone middle-aged and older in the English speaking world has heard the name Graham Greene.  Writing in nearly all forms and many of his books adapted for the silver screen, he is one of the main literary figures of the 20 th century.  The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Honorary Consul, and The End of the Affair are major novels that deftly mix sharp prose, subtle drama, and interests that delicately combine personal and political concern. 

Set in a variety of locations far adrift from his native Albion, many of his novels travel the world.  And the settings are not without personal knowledge; Greene himself visited many of the places he would later set his novels in.  One of his first published works is the record of a one-month trip in Liberia in 1935.  Greene calls Journey Without Maps (1936) his quest to find Joseph Conrad’s ‘heart of darkness’, but there is speculation that the trip may have also served to kill a few other birds, government work and supplementing fiction sales among them.

Review of Kraken by China Mieville

China Mieville entered the fiction scene quietly.  King Rat was an unconventional horror novel that gained some recognition through award nominations, but little success commercially.  Perdido Street Station the book that put Mieville’s name on the map, readers who could overlook its lexical diarrhea discovered a unique story of hitherto unknown proportions in genre—no mean feat in the 21st century.  Bas-Lag a fantastical, fertile setting, Mieville penned two additional novels in the milieu, the storylines gaining integrity with every step.  (Even if Iron Council was messily executed, its ideas transcend the simplicity of Perdido’s aim to be “a good monster story”.)  The follow up to Bas-Lag, The City & the City (2009), saw increased focus on social/political ideals, but was bundled with tight prose and a refined structure to produce Mieville’s most accomplished novel to date.  It’s thus with Kraken (2010), the next novel, a regression can be observed, and if not regression, at least reversion.

Hearkening back to the urban horror/fantasy of King Rat, Kraken is a unique romp through London that swims with undersea monsters and cults.  Mieville (thankfully) abandoning his ‘why use one word when twenty esoteric will do’ approach to storytelling, Kraken is a focused plot that works its way lucidly, patiently, one paranormally Weird step at a time through arcane magic, supernatural gangsters, and of course, the mother of all giant squids in Mother London. Taking a seemingly innocuous natural history museum and turning it on its fantastic head, all sorts of the esoteric emerge from the woodwork as the apocalypse descends on the kidnapped cephalopod.

Review of The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

Obsessed perhaps too strong a word and concerned certainly too light, expressing J.G. Ballard’s interest in humanity as it faces catastrophe is, suffice to say, involved.  The first four novels of his career delving into a variety of human responses to a selection of “environmental” disasters (the quotes due to the fourth, The Crystal World), Ballard openly stated in interviews that such scenarios were among the best means of cutting to the bone of psyche.  Apparently also a believer in such premises, Robert Charles Wilson penned The Chronoliths in 2001, and in doing so produced a text equal in quality to Ballard’s disaster novels, laying bare another perspective on humanity’s reaction to extreme change.

The Chronoliths is the story of Scott Warden, a down-on-his-luck husband and father who has the bright idea to forgo his career as a computer programmer and move his family to Thailand to research and write a book. The move failing in nearly every way, his daughter contracts a bacterial illness that destroys her hearing, his research never really takes shape, and he burns through more money than what he earns.  To top it all off, riding through the jungle one day he and erstwhile friend Hitch Paley are witness to the sudden and seemingly miraculous appearance of a strange ice-blue monolith.  By the time he’s done being interrogated by the Thai military and returned to Bangkok, Warden’s wife has left for the US and he must scrounge for money to get a ticket home.  Divorce proceedings awaiting his arrival stateside, he is forced to rebuild his career from the bottom.  Though maintaining a relationship with his daughter, the years grow more uncertain as one after another the extraordinary chronoliths appear around the globe.

Review of Lost Pages by Paul Di Filippo

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Harlan Ellison’s “The Deathbird”, Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death, Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, C.M. Kornbluth’s “MS Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie”, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen—on and on goes the list of works interacting with the idea of fiction while being fiction.  Each with their own vector to how speculative fiction might be meta’d, none to date, however, have engaged with the spectrum of the genre’s roots in the same fashion as Paul Di Filippo’s 1998 collection Lost Pages.  Kafka as super hero, PKD as a paranoid hardware salesman, Dr. Strangelove and his souped up Cadillac—and many other pieces of speculative fiction’s history flash through this collection of short stories that transcend the page and touch upon the real world.  Chris Brown calling Di Filippo “Mixmaster of the Cranial Museum”, Lost Pages is an exemplary text.

Fiction about fiction a potentially pretentious undertaking, Lost Pages is anything but.  Di Filippo as knowledgeable of the genre’s history as he is a part of it, the collection is wholly in respectful yet mischievous dialogue with the field. Bouncing amongst a variety of touch points, the stories play with the lives and works of known science fiction authors, by turns intelligently, interestingly, poignantly, and always enjoyably.  Rather than merely inverting norms or switching out simple aspects of history, Di Filippo engages with the writers, their works, and their biographies to produce complex stories with more than one level of conception.  Thus, it’s best to get the caveat out of the way: if you are interested in reading Di Filippo but have little knowledge of science fiction beyond the past decade, don’t waste your time.  Lost Pages is for the genre connoisseur.  (There are other good places to delve into Di Filippo for the unsaturated—aka non sf nerd—e.g. Ribofunk, The Steampunk Trilogy, and Cosmocopia.)

Review of Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

In the coming two years, the Indian space program (ISRO) is set to explore the moon, the sun, and Venus.  All research and development for these projects is ongoing while the surrounding population continues to be measured to the nearest one-hundred million because nobody can count to any greater point of accuracy the sheer number of homeless, starving, and dying on the streets.  Add to this the cows (and disease) feeding on unremoved heaps of trash in the streets, people defecating in public, and infrastructure that’s a far cry from first world standards, and the question must be asked: why is India spending billions of dollars on space technology?  Does the knowledge gained have any direct effect on the quality of its citizen’s lives? Would the billions be better invested in medicine, urban infrastructure, housing, and other amenities of life the West takes for granted?  And while we’re at it, why too is the West investing in similar projects when we too are far from solving our own issues?  Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 Aurora answers these questions—definitively. 

Robinson pretty much wrote the book on Martian terraforming (ha!), and by that same token Aurora may very well be the greatest generation starship story ever told.  Touching, pertinent, purposeful, epic, realistic, passionate, responsible, important—all seem adjectives suitable to the novel, up to and including, perhaps, being Robinson’s best ever.  (When I’ve finished his oeuvre, I’ll get back to you on this one; only a few more to go.)

Review of The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley

In the course of introducing each of the stories in his classic Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Bruce Sterling laments the death of cyberpunk.  Published at what would be considered the middle of the cyberpunk wave (looking strictly in terms of what was published when), Sterling’s words may seem misguided.  But that would be to miss the point: Sterling was referring to the artistic death of the subgenre.  Any wave needing to recede into the ocean before it can officially be considered over, the latter half of cyberpunk is indeed more imitation than cutting edge.  Sure, slight adjustments, changes of angle, and fuzzy connections to other sub-genres were introduced. But as a whole, the most unique ideas of cyberpunk came about when the wave was moving toward the shore—a moment Sterling seems to capture in Mirrorshades.  Epic grimdark another such wave of genre, Brian Staveley’s The Emperor’s Blades, given its unoriginal outlay, must be considered as washing back into the ocean.* 

“On the coattails of a dead man, she’ll ride, she’ll ride… On the coattails of a deadman…”  So run the lyrics of a Primus song.  With Tom Waits’ baritone haunting the background, it’s a dirge that echoes The Emperor’s Blades epic grimdark re-re-rehash.  If you’ve read George R.R.Martin, R. Scott Bakker, Ken Follett, Joe Abercrombie, etc., etc., then you’ve read The Emperor’s Blades.  Staveley brings some writing chops to the table (more later), but the offering is threadbare in terms of singularity.  Even the series’ title hints at the passing: Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne.  Having to resort to a negative adjective, you can almost hear the kettle drums booming in the distance.

Review of Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories by James Patrick Kelly

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: one of the aspects that sets science fiction apart from other genres is its continued heritage of short fiction.  A myriad of stories that approach life from all—literally all—manner of perspectives, the heritage is as dynamic as it is varied, and is truly a treasure just waiting to be explored by readers of only novel-length work.  And James Patrick Kelly is one of the best in short form.  Seeing his name the exposed reader knows they will be getting a well-thought out story written in effective prose that probes some of the bigger issues mankind confronts, almost always from a humanist point of view despite the window dressing.  Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories (1997), Kelly’s second published collection, is a perfect example of this outlay, and one of the reasons why science fiction in short form is as vigorous as it is.

Starting things off with a metaphysical slap is the title story “Think Like a Dinosaur.”  The mind possible to be separated from the body and shot light years into space, the novelette is the story of Michael Burr, a handler of humans on behalf of an alien group nicknamed ‘dinos’ due to their appearance who have gifted the technology to Earth.  A clone body receiving the psyche at the other end, the body that remains must be disposed of, hence Michael’s job as ‘handler’.  Unfortunately for Michael, his job doesn’t go as planned one day.  Presented a scenario both ethically and existentially challenging, its twist on reality etches abstract consequences in the reader’s thoughts.  Another story using a sacrifice theme is “Breakaway, Breakdown”; after spending months in orbit; a person faces the choice, literally of a lifetime. The physical effects of life in space often glossed over in favor of laser guns and space ships, the story proves humanity will have a lot more on its mind when looking to live among the stars than just how to build a spaceship or alien invasion.

Review of We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory

And again I find myself sitting on the fence.  This time around: was it a respectful usage of personal problems, i.e. something that raises awareness about contemporary psycho-sociological issues?  Or just a means to a way, i.e. an inappropriate usage of said personal issues to achieve commercial success?  But I get ahead of myself.  It’s best I describe the things I do know about Daryl Gregory’s 2014 We Are All Completely Fine, first.

We Are All Completely Fine outlays the mental and social issues of five people dealing with trauma in engaging, generally realistic (if not extreme) fashion.  A video game channeled through his sunglasses, a teenage boy has grown dependent on the zombies and post-apocalyptic background details the game overlays upon his view of the world.  An elderly man with hoarding problems was de-limbed by a family of cannibals and now lives in resentment in a wheelchair.  Images carved on her bones, a woman is haunted by a scrimshander—a bone etcher.  A writer wrestles with demons not only in his fiction, but in his real world, as well.  And a young woman with ornamental scars covering her body, attempts to deal with her past in a cult.  Meeting once per week in group session, the five slowly open themselves up, revealing their backstories to the others, all the while the trouble from their traumatic pasts leaks through into the real world.