Review of Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

John DeNardo on SF Signal decries Algis Budrys' 1960 Rogue Moon for its character development and focus on existentialism, opining that “too much of the book centers on the characters of Hawks, Barker, Claire,, and Vincent Connington. While their stories are somewhat interesting, I really wanted to see more of the BDO.”  It’s precisely superficial attitudes like this which have kept much of sf in the gutter, my friends.  Gimme cool death machines rather than exploration of human nature…  Yeah.  But I get ahead of myself.

From its title to the central plot device, Rogue Moon is an enigma.  Is it satire on the American system and what it demands of a person before they die?  A meditation on death from the point of view of numerous character types?  Allegory to the subjectivity of existence and the variety of responses to that notion?  Or just an obtuse idea, presented as conceived, without deeper significance?

Review of Breathmoss and Other Exhalations by Ian R. Macleod

Ian Macleod is, point blank, one of the best sf&f writers in the field today.  Each piece, from short story to novel, comes fully considered, polished til shining, imaginative, multi-layered, and persistently focused on humanity—no matter how wild the speculation may get.  So why haven’t you read him?  Macleod’s 2004 collection Breathmoss and Other Exhalations is an excellent palette of stories to dig into.  Perfectly representative of the author’s range and talent, there may be no better starting place.

Breathmoss and Other Exhalations opens with its title story.  We meet Jalili as a young girl in the midst of a major family move from the sparsely populated highlands to its more dense coastal lowlands of the planet Hebara.  The move tough, Jalili nevertheless sees and experiences things she’d never dreamed—rocket ships take off, new cultures and peoples, and, as is strange in her all-female family, men.  “Breathmoss” a touching coming-of-age story that eschews most any paint-by-the-numbers idea the reader could throw at such a story type, tragedy and comedy are only stepping stones to Jalili’s self-realization.  (For extended review, see here.)

Review of The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

It’s always something of a disappointment in my post-reading about a novel to discover a review which has summarized it so precisely as to render any opinion or words I can conjure, secondary.  Such is the case with Nick Harkaway’s 2009 The Gone-Away World.  In The Guardian, David Poole writes the novel is“…a bit like spending a week with a hyperactive puppy: there are delightful moments aplenty, but it's slightly wearing over the long run. Still, any author who has come up with the beautifully silly plan of melding a kung-fu epic with an Iraq-war satire and a Mad Max adventure has to be worth keeping an eye on.” Summing it up perfectly, this review will, accordingly, be brief.

As Poole insinuates, The Gone-Away World is exuberant fun.  Foremost linguistically, I feel I should capitalize EXUBERANT FUN.  Bending and twisting characters and dialogue into lexical elbows and knees, meaning is always clear but the approach angles and result are linguistic loops and swirls—anything but ordinary.  From scene to syntax, there seems no digression untaken, which can be really engrossing, but also annoying.  Here is one such digression (leading to several other digressions, before getting back on track):

Review of The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

One of the things that has always bothered me about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Princess of Mars is how easily John Carter was able to rally hordes of men in support of his pursuit of Dejah Thoris.  What damn does the ordinary man give whether Carter gets a kiss before he goes to sleep at night?  And yet there they were, dying for his ego.  Barsoom a contrived fiction, the sentiment of an obedient mass blindly following its megalomaniac leader nevertheless transcends the text.  Spinrad spinning this idea to the historical surreal, he penned The Iron Dream in 1972, and in doing so, put Hitler’s wildest dreams into Burroughs-esque, pulp form.  In the words of Joachim Boaz, it may even be possible after finishing the novel that the reader “will never read pulp SF/F in the same way…”

The Iron Dream is a fantastic, pulling-out-of-the-rug-from-beneath-the-feet of male power fantasy inherent to much science fiction and fantasy.  The deconstruction presented in a novel-within-a-novel, The Iron Dream opens with a brief pseudo-biography of the science fiction writer Adolph Hitler and is followed by his Hugo Award winning novel Lord of the Swastika.  The afterword, provided by one Homer Whipple (i.e. Spinrad in open disguise), psychoanalyzes the Fuhrer’s ideas for extra abstraction.

Review of Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman

In the context of its era, the work of James Tiptree Jr. was a slap in the face of mainstream sf.  Openly challenging a number of traditions, from gender roles to the context of male authority, to say she was influential on the current group of texts expressing similar opinions on many of the same issues would be to put it lightly.  In most of these texts, however, the influence is only indirect; there are similarities in ideology but often nothing more concrete ties the works together.  With Carolyn Ives Gilman’s 2015 Dark Orbit, however, the antecedent is clear.

A case wherein a writer uses ideas and capabilities to expand upon what has come before, Dark Orbit is not mere imitation Tiptree, however.  Examining identity, emotions vs. logic, gender treatment, response to Otherness/alien-ness, and a couple other significant areas, Gilman blunts the paranoia of Tiptree Jr. by better blending presentation with setting and character.  A certain melancholy still pervades (starting with the title), but Gilman’s novel is more introspective and open to possibilities, something that Tiptree Jr.’s work can rarely be described as. 

Review of This Is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow

The Cold War is ironically one of the most ludicrous yet perversely understandable events in human history.  Male chest blustering at the largest scale possible, massive collections of the most destructive weapons the world has ever known stood passcode and red button ready to be launched at the perceived enemy.  Expanding on the ludicrous nature of the situation, James Morrow’s 1986 This Is the Way the World Ends is Cold War satire of the most absurd, surreal bent—and yet, relatable.

George Paxton is an ordinary guy living an ordinary life in small town Massachusetts.  Husband and father, the light of his life is his five-year old daughter, Holly.  The world seemingly on the brink of war, scopa suits (suits designed to protect the individual from nuclear attack) are all the rage. The price of one scopa suit more than George and his wife can afford, when he receives a favor in return for a nice turn for a customer, he decides to do what any loving father would do for his daughter: he cashes in on a scopa suit.  Trouble is, in order to receive the goods, he has to sign on the dotted line that he is complicit in the ongoing cold war.

Review of Old Venus ed. by Gardner Dozois & George R.R. Martin

George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois’ themed anthologies are some of the most popular on the market these days.  Soliciting the genre’s best-known mainstream writers, selecting highly familiar themes, and letting length run to 500+ pages, Rogues, Warriors, Dangerous Women, Songs of the Dying Earth, Old Mars, and others are some of the bestselling anthologies the past five years.  Once again not trying to reinvent the wheel, the duo released Old Venus in 2015 with all of the above attributes.

If you catch a hint of disdain in the opening paragraph, it’s real.  Old Venus is yet another interminable sequence of stories by authors using familiar modes and motifs stuck in the same setting.  Therefore, if mainstream genre is your bread and butter, you can skip the rest of this review and buy the anthology.  What follows will only upset you.

Generally lackluster, seemingly every story (though, in reality not every) in Old Venus features swamps, jungles, frog/reptile-esque aliens, steamy climate, and a plot as retro as Hugo Gernsback could ever want.  Almost all the stories novelettes, this also means the anthology runs to 600+ pages, despite containing only sixteen stories.  Monotonous unless supplemented with other reading material in between incursions, this is one of those anthologies severely limited by theme and the authors solicited.

Best Reads of 2015

As has become a tradition here in the bustling offices of Speculiction, we’ve gleaned 2015’s posts and chosen the best books, collections, anthologies, and short stories reviewed, regardless of when the book was originally published.  (For a summary of books published in 2015, see here.)

Novels

The Glamour by Christopher Priest – A person can expect a novel from Christopher Priest will be based on the subjectivity of perception, and The Glamour is that.  The wonderful thing is, the concept is so rich with potential one never knows in what direction Priest will take it, and by the time they’ve figured it out, they’re already wrapped up in an engaging, intellectually stimulating experience whose complexity does not match the deceivingly simple mode of presentation. The Glamour is that, too.

Good News from Outer Space by John Kessel – A novel that was released to little fanfare, and has garnered little in the decades since, it nevertheless is a fine, literary work examining the human side of life’s inexplicable, seemingly fantastical events, and the variety of sense and meaning (and madness) that humans subsequently attach to them.  Delicately satirical and oh so well written, the novel deserves more attention than it received.

Aurora – Kim Stanley Robinson – Amidst the flurry of ever wilder genre excursions comes what some are calling Robinson’s best ever.  The story of a generation starship endeavor gone awry, Robinson puts the brakes on techno-fantasy futuristic speculation and places the focus square back on Earth.

Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock – Along with Robinson’s Aurora, this was my pick for best speculative fiction novel published in 2015.  Featuring windows into the lives of three women, past, present and future, and focusing on their interaction with art, the creative process, and art in the social/public arena, it is a politicized novel, but one which wields its agenda tactfully.  Amazon reviewers looking for more of the same ol’-same ol’ were disappointed with the ending, but they, in fact, identified the novel’s most delicately expressive moment.

Review of Radiant Days by Elizabeth Hand

Writers use their personal inspirations in a lot of different ways in their fiction.  It may be something only peripherally motivational, detected in a character name or subtle setting detail, and it may be so much as a complete rip-off.  Elizabeth Hand is a writer prone to using personal experience in creating her characters and settings, but to date has yet to dip into historical reference for inspiration.  Radiant Days (2012), however, finds the versatile writer paralleling the troubled youth of Arthur Rimbaud with the strife experienced by a gifted young woman trying to survive herself.

Merle is from a troubled home.  Her father a drinker and mother essentially non-existent, it’s only through the motivation of a teacher and a little luck that she gets a place at an art university in Washington D.C. in 1978.  Her first semester not going off as planned, an affair with a married woman, a failed trip to the big city, and a general rebelliousness serve to push her into the gutter: a university drop-out without a home.  Walking the riverbank one night she encounters an aging musician tramping it in rags and tattered boots.  Her life, surprisingly, changes forever.

Review of "Uh-Oh City" by Jonathan Carroll

These days the amount of discussion, commentary, criticism, review material, etc. available on sf and fantasy is astounding.  The gates blown off by the internet, anyone with a google account can create a blog and be a critic.  Naturally in this flood exist people with simple mindsets; they love or hate something, and are unafraid to spout either.  Often insensitive to the relativity of the positions (unskilled reviewer vs. professional writer) not to mention lacking the tools necessary to properly review, the result can be hurt feelings if the writer is particularly prone to personalizing such attacks.  The attacks often more satisfaction of the reviewer’s ego than personal (i.e. this is my opinion, here me roar), were the reviewer to actually meet and spend time with the author they bash, undoubtedly future reviews would be more objective, and if negative, at least constructive in their criticism.  Such is the nature of learning to put yourself in other positions.  “Uh-Oh City,” Jonathan Carroll’s superb 1992 novella, is a finely imagined and more eloquent manner of arriving at the same point.  In fact, do yourself a favor and abandon this hack review and go read the novella.

For those who didn’t…