Review of Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem’s first published novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, was surreal science fiction painted in the colors of Philip K. Dick but built on the chassis of a Raymond Chandler novel.  Successful style-wise, Lethem paid homage to a couple of his favorite writers while getting his feet wet in publishing.  Five years later as a writer with four novels and a short story collection under his belt, fully immersed, Lethem produced another novel of detective noir proportion, Motherless Brooklyn (1999).  Moving past homage and into singular, personalized fiction, it shows a mature author in control of his craft.  But Lionel Essrog is the reason to read.

Though Chandler will haunt the shadows of any private eye story, Motherless Brooklyn is written in Lethem’s own hand.  There is a murder mystery, shadowy NYC is the setting, and a fairly typical gamut of plotting—through police investigations, crime figures, and female interests—is run.  But the phrasing, the tone, and character portrayal are something different.  NYC is brought to minimalist life; the flow of story is more staid, less predictable; and Lionel Essrog is as memorable and atypically heartfelt a character as one can imagine.

Review of The Warrior Prophet by R. Scott Bakker

Gary K. Wolfe once made the statement on the Coode Street Podcast that bridge books in trilogies are useless—that it’s possible to skip the middle volume without missing anything for the third.  While there are several examples that support his claim, R. Scott Bakker’s The Warrior-Prophet, second book in the Prince of Nothing trilogy, balks at it.  Shaking off the bridge book blues, the novel picks up where The Darkness that Comes Before left off and escalates the story in critical fashion to the third and final volume, The Thousandfold Thought. 

Like the importance of The Two Towers to The Lord of the Rings, so too is The Warrior Prophet to The Prince of Nothing.  A convergence of powerful characters and a grand revelation about Earwa occurring at the end of the previous novel, The Warrior Prophet proceeds directly from this point.  Kicking off the Holy War, thousands upon thousands of soldiers are set marching to the land of the heathen Fanim and begin taking down cities one by one, all while fractures begin appearing in leadership.  Kellhus, despite starting to make a name for himself, has the mysteries surrounding his origin and purpose deepen.  Dreams of the First Apocalypse continue to haunt Achamian’s nights, making it more difficult for him to know how to proceed with Kellhus—the Scarlet Spires haunting his footsteps in the daytime.  Skin-spies continue to be revealed in key places, and the emperor, still reeling from his dungeon encounter, sits on the throne, digging himself ever deeper into a pit of fear and anxiety.

Review of The Steampunk Trilogy by Paul Di Filippo

Paul Di Filippo may be speculative fiction’s best kept secret.  As imaginative as any reader could ever hope, erudite and inventive regarding the history of literature and the writers who populate it, sensitive to his texts’ political stance, boisterous wordsmith of the nth degree, and clever-clever in his plotting, it’s difficult to ask for more.  But perhaps Di Filippo’s greatest talent is awareness of the genre’s undercurrents before they hit the shore.  Though technically a second-wave creation, his 1995 collection The Steampunk Trilogy was nevertheless on the steampunk wagon 10-15 years before the massive third-wave explosion hit the mainstream.

Containing three novellas, The Steampunk Trilogy utilizes Di Filippo’s variegated talents to play with a few of the tropes and themes common to the sub-genre inherent to the title in original fashion.  Alternate history, a bit of clockwork gadgetry, 19th century America and Britain, colorful characters and dialogue, famed historical figures, and some bizarre uses for “biology.” But the underlying ideas (what often amounts to brazen challenges to many of the social and cultural mores of the era) feature most heavily.  Set off by Di Filippo’s raw aptitude for writing, the three novellas set the bar for second wave steampunk.

Review of Accelerando by Charles Stross

I find no better analogy for the fiction of Charles Stross than the pop and fizz of a champagne bottle being opened. Bubbling with ideas, and expressing them in the most exuberant prose, reading a Stross novel can leave the reader reeling, at a loss to assimilate the myriad concepts thrown their way.  A few days needed to recover, Accelerando (2005) may just be Stross’ most exemplary novel.

Hailed by many at the time as the new generation’s Neuromancer, Accelerando plots the imaginary course of Vernor Vinge’s singularity from near-future cyberpunk to post-human existence among the stars.  While there are perhaps too many post-human/A.I. antecedents to make a valid argument, Accelerando pushes ahead.  The tech boom of 90s paving the way for a new perspective on technology and humanity, Stross fully futurizes the new possibilities for language, gadgets, and social paradigms to a point impossible in sf 50 years ago.

Review of Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ

As everybody knows, the middle of the 20th century was a time of great social upheaval in the US.  As the Silver Age shed its glow, advances in civil rights, Vietnam war protest, flower power, and other counter-culture movements took center stage.  The old guard forced to take a stand, so too in science fiction were traditional ways challenged.  From narrative structure and style to race and gender assumptions, the genre expanded, using it’s own unique tools to express the zeitgeist.  Presenting the anti-Conan, Joanna Russ’ Picnic in Paradise (1968) is a part of that literary upheaval—not a key part, but certainly a contributor.

Hardened female soldier stuck in a semi-utopian civilization, Picnic in Paradise is the story of Alyx.  Displaced in time, she is pressed into acting as guide for a group of spoiled humans—all upgraded bigger, stronger, and more beautiful than herself—across uninhabited, scenic terrain.  Despite the commercial war going on in the background, Alyx expects the trip to be an easy one, and thinks they can make it in a matter of days.  Events quickly escalate, however, and what was supposed to be a week-and-a-half becomes weeks.  But the journey is not the only thing that stretches. Alyx’s personality caught in a variety of conflicts with her past and the vices of the travelers, she is forced to confront, and in some cases conquer, personal demons as their journey becomes ever more harrowing in the wild beyond.

Review of Twelve Kings of Sharakhai by Bradley Beaulieu

The following is less a review and more a response to Bradley Beaulieu’s 2015 Twelve Kings in Sharakhai.

I recall encountering the term ‘churnalism’ in John Clute’s review of Paolo Bacigalupi’s novella “The Alchemist”on Strange Horizons.  I’ve not investigated the term further, but Clute’s typically abstract phrasing left me with an impression of its meaning: product pumped out of a manufacturing facility to keep the conveyor belt of mainstream fiction turning.  Within two chapters of Beaulieu’s Twelve Kings in Sharakhai my mind immediately snapped to ‘churnalism.’

The novels opens with a bloody gladiator fight between a warrior woman and hulking male fighter (aka “feminism” in modern genre), and within a few paragraphs transitions to a graphic sex scene featuring said warrioress (including the words “spilled seed,” “manhood,” “gasp,” and other such refined expressions).  Pure advertizing, such an opening ‘hook’ screams: “If you want more of this, keep reading!!”  Obviously trying to capture a piece of the success of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones tv series and its similar dependence on unending sex and violence, Beaulieu’s novel, at least what I read beyond this point, is rife with sensationalism but little if nothing of deeper substance. 

Review of The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg

David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet opens with a shot of an ultra-typical, American suburban home.  Slowly zooming in on the lawn, the view descends through blades of grass to the swarm of insects in the earth beneath.  While Lynch used the symbolism to represent his opinion of what was happening behind the white-picket fence, 1.5 children veneer of suburban America, it’s also possible to transpose the symbolism into other areas, the human mind among them.  The veneer the late 60s and early 70s free love and groovy times, Robert Silverberg uses his 1971 The Book of Skulls to dig beneath its surface, particularly the era’s male youth to find what swarms beneath.  It isn’t pretty.

But the novel starts in thriller land.  Four will enter: one will commit suicide and another be murdered, and the last two will exit immortal.  Thankfully, The Book of Skulls is more than this cheesy idea would promise.  Hovering uncertainly between realist fiction and satire, the premise is engaged and resolved via character rather than plot or melodrama.  Rendered in smooth and subtly affective prose, Silverberg presents the machinations of four human minds in all their dirty detail while taking to task aspects of the (post?) flower-power mindset.

Awards Like Stars in the Sky: The Canopus

The past year has seen a Pluto flyby, a Mars landing, and an asteroid landing—all major, major successes for space exploration and events whose images are utterly fascinating for their reality and the mind boggling amount of calculation and preparation that went into getting each.  These missions remind us that, despite the immense technological deficiencies remaining, some small progress is being made toward humans beyond the moon.  These three successes apparently so poignant, a new science fiction award was created.  Just what the genre needed… 

Intending to spotlight works that have interstellar exploration and travel as their prime motif, The Canopus Award was inaugurated just this past week.  Such is the world we live in today.  Don’t like something?  Change it yourself!  With a little bit of money and a few people to help coordinate the necessities (locating pertinent texts, writing policies and procedures, creating online presence, etc.) one can, in this example, attempt to overcome the wrenches in the works (known as Barry Malzberg, cyberpunk, and space fantasy—sorry, Singularity texts) and get back to the good ol’ fashion idea of massive metal objects transporting humans through the great void at great speed by creating an award that brings awareness to such texts.

Review of Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock

From one (admittedly simple) perspective, art can be divided into two parts: the internalized (what is created or enjoyed for individual satisfaction) and the externalized (what is bought/sold, exhibited, studied, discussed, and passed on through time by society).  Both are highly dependent on the fact a means is available.  Without materials or access, an individual cannot create or partake in art, just as without sponsorship, research, knowledgeable persons, public venues, etc. art is not integrated into society at large.  Inject gender into these two halves of a whole and you’ve got the delicate, intelligent workings of Anne Charnock’s wonderful second novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (2015, 47North).

On the surface, Sleeping Embers is the story of three iterations of young women.  Real-life daughter to the fifteenth century Italian master painter Paolo Uccello, young Antonia looks ahead to her adult life with trepidation.  Despite showing promising talent, painting is a limited option to females of the era.  A life in the cloisters of a nunnery or as a dowried wife to a nobleman are her only options.  Living in contemporary UK, Toni is a thirteen-year old girl on a trip with her father, a skilled copyist, to China for a proposed commission.  Her mother having died in a car accident a few months back, she and her father are trying to get their lives back together with just the two of them.  And in the early twenty-second century, Toniah is starting post-graduate work in art history at a university in London.  Middle daughter in a parthenogenetic (all-female) family, she attempts to apply her knowledge of quattrocento art in women’s restitution studies, but meets some resistance.  The discovery of a never before seen painting by one Antonia Uccello, however, changes her luck.

Review of The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration is one of alternate history’s most notable texts.  As with many British books, its concerns are largely centered on Old Albion, particularly what the Isles would have been like were the Reformation never to have occurred. A wonderfully-imagined possible intersection of religion, politics, and culture, one can’t help but wonder the degree of its influence on Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt.  A book that likewise pivots religious concerns on a single point in history, Robinson removes Christianity and Judaism from the scene to focus on the two major religions that remain, Islam and Buddhism.  Published in the wake of 9-11, Robinson forgoes finger-pointing to build something of his re-aligned, Asiatic world.

The first two major iterations of monotheism eliminated, The Years of Rice and Salt posits a Jonbar point wherein Black Death wipes out 99% of Christendom and Judaism in Europe.  In essence laying out the red carpet for Islam to expand westwards and China eastwards, Robinson revisions the world to be dominated by these two major powers.  Not wholly a dichotomy, Hindustani India retains a toehold, and without invading Europeans, so too does the Native American population.  (Given extra years without European invasion to disrupt the relative cultural and technological homogeneity, Robinson envisions the tribes forming a loose but stable coalition that evolves to a point it becomes a global player politically and commercially—an interesting aspect, indeed.)