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One thing I forgot to mention in my write-up of Long Way to a Small Angry Planet yesterday was how much the book is about violence and the ways in which cultures and individuals deal with it. I mentioned Dr Chef’s species the Grum who had destroyed themselves in a war and the survivors had decided it was not worth rebuilding their society, they had ruined their right to exist in the galaxy and so the species is going extinct.

I also mentioned the captain of the ship, Ashby. As an Exodan human he is a pacifist. When humans were still on Earth and doing their best to destroy it and each other, the wealthy picked up stakes and moved to Mars, creating a colony there but only for the people who could afford it. Those left behind on a planet that was no longer hospitable to human life, made a last ditch effort to survive by building ships and launching out into the unknowns of space with no real destination. Some of them survived because they were found by one of the species of the Galactic Commons. As a result of their experiences, the Exodan humans developed a culture of pacifism that is often so extreme they refuse to even defend themselves when attacked.
 
All of the various species in the book have stories of violence and war in their collective histories. The Galactic Commons itself is a kind of galactic UN. How each culture came to terms with their violent past makes for an interesting examination of responses to violence. One culture goes in for communal orgies while another becomes so rule-bound that spontaneity is not heard of and would probably get you thrown into prison anyway.
 
Then there are the Toremi, a species whose whole existence is shaped by the continuous wars between the clans. They all believe the wars are sanctioned by the Pattern, the belief system by which they live. The violence doesn’t just exist between clans but within one’s own clan as well. It is a kind of dog-eat-dog existence and the more you kill the more respect you garner. Any offence no matter how slight, might get you killed or prompt you to kill someone else.
 
One of the great things about the book is that while all of this is there, it is never posted with flashing neon signs nor does the author make any intrusions and tell us what to think. We are being offered options, different ways of being and the reader gets to choose and decide for herself.
 
And this is why blogs are so great for talking about books – we aren’t bound to one review and done, we get extra innings.
 
While perusing the Baileys Prize longlist I spied The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie. This is the book that has the tête-à-tête with the charismatic squirrel in it that I am waiting my turn for it at the library. I have moved up to 27th place. Alas I was hoping I would have that book and the next Squirrel Girl comic about the same time but it is not looking likely. I am already up to number 8 for Squirrel Girl.
 
Since I am on the topic of books on prize lists, The Vegetarian is on the longlist for the Man Booker International. I’m sure all the books on the list are good but I can’t imagine that any of them could be as good as Kang’s. I hope she wins!
 
Another unsolicited distraction arrived in my mailbox yesterday. This one is by Janet Todd. That would be the same Janet Todd who has written biographies of Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, and many others. Except this book is a novel, A Man of Genius. Because of the cover (a Venice canal) and the cover blurb rapturing on about love, obsession and “decadent glory,” I was in the process of moving it to the pile of books to get rid of when Bookman stopped me. You know who Janet Todd is don’t you? The name was familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. Then Bookman connected the dots for me and suggested I might want to not be so hasty in getting rid of it. He was right. So now it is on my poor reading table.

The book is historical fiction featuring a woman who makes a living writing cheap gothic novels. She meets and becomes the lover of Robert James, supposed poetic genius. They go to Venice. Spies, intrigue, madness, revelations ensue. Sounds like a potboiler and not my typical choice of reading but I will give it try. Just don’t know when yet. But that probably surprises no one.

I have been looking forward to telling you all about The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers since I finished it a few days ago. It is one of those quiet books that you want to tell everyone to read because you loved it so very much and just did not want it to end and you want everyone else to love it as much you do. And then I find out it has made it onto the Baileys Women’s Prize Longlist and did you hear me go Squeee!? Because now for sure more people will know about this book.

The Long Way is Chambers’ debut novel. It was originally published because of a Kickstarter. Chambers found herself almost through a draft when her freelance writing work dried up. She had two options, shelve the book and return to it later or see if she could get funding to get it published. Thank goodness she got funding!

The book is one of those stories that is about everything and nothing. There is not much of a plot and hardly any action but I loved the characters so much every time I picked up the book I wanted to hang out with them and never leave.

The story takes place in the distant future. Humans have destroyed Earth, colonized Mars and headed out to the stars. But we have also gone back to Earth to try and fix the damage. As a result we have a number of different human societies with vastly different values. We’ve also met other species out there in the galaxy and become part of the Galactic Commons. The Wayfarer is a tunneling ship. They take jobs where they create tunnels through space and time to shorten the distance between areas of the galaxy to make space travel easier and faster. Basically they create stable wormholes from point A to point B.

The ship is owned and captained by the genial Ashby, a human of the Exodans, which means he is a pacifist among other things. His crew is composed of Rosemary, a clerk and new hire he brings on to do all the paperwork at which he is really bad and because of that is in jeopardy of not being able to pick up good work. Rosemary is a Martian human and running away from something. Then there are the ship’s techs, Kizzy (human) who loves fire shrimp, crazy outfits and keeps the engines running and the systems in operating order, and Jenks (human) who is the computer wizard and keeps the ship’s AI, Lovey, in tip top shape. Jenks is a small man because his Gaian mother did not believe in vaccinations and other sorts of medical interventions. Lovey, the AI, is sentient and she and Jenks are in love.

Also on the crew is Sissix. She is the pilot and an Aandrisk, a species that to humans look like person-sized lizards with feathers on their heads. Dr Chef is both the ship’s cook and doctor. He is a species called Grum, a six legged kind of insect-y looking individual. He is one of about 300 left of his kind because they had a great war and pretty much destroyed themselves. The survivors decided that as a species they no longer deserved to reproduce and so they are on the verge of going extinct.

We also have Ohan, the navigator. They are a Sianat pair, a species that is tall and furry. Long ago some of them were infected with a virus that allows them to see space and time like no other creature in the known galaxy. The culture developed so that each Sianat is deliberately infected with the virus at a certain age and at that time the infected individual goes from being singular to being a pair. Those who refuse to be infected or who partake of the cure, are heretics exiled.

Finally there is Corbin. He is the ship’s algaeist. The ship’s fuel is mostly algae and it is Corbin’s job to grow the algae and do all things algae. He is really good at his job and really bad at being a decent human being. Perpetually grumpy and uncomfortable around others, he is perfectly happy spending all his time with the algae and minimal time with the rest of crew.

The Wayfarer has been awarded a big and well-paying job by the General Commons. They are to create a new tunnel into Toremi Ka space. The Toremi Ka are a species that is perpetually at war among their various clans. There has recently been a schism and some of the Toremi Ka have made a treaty with the GC, protect us from the other clans and we will give you unlimited access to ambi, a hard to harvest and expensive fuel. It will take the Wayfarer a year to reach the spot in Tormei Ka space where they are to create the tunnel. And so we follow the crew over the course of the year as they go from place to place, making stops to visit friends and family along the way, pick up supplies, and have a few unexpected things happen. They arrive to do the tunnel, a few more things happen.

And that’s it. The whole story.

The point is not the plot, not the tunneling job. The point of the story is the journey there, the characters, their thoughts and dreams and hopes and fears, their relationships with each other. It is a story about getting along with people who have vastly different backgrounds and beliefs. There is much here about tolerance and acceptance. There is a crisis moment when someone is dying but can be saved by a medical intervention that goes against every single one of their beliefs.

It is hard to say why I loved this book so much. Maybe it is because the characters are so well developed? Maybe because I liked them all so much, even the grumpy Corbin. There was no slow part, not once did I wish the book would move along faster but many times I wished it would slow down so I could linger longer.

I know a lot of people don’t like science fiction but I think this is a science fiction book even non-SF reading people might like. And if you are an SF fan and I tell you the book has a Firefly feel to it, you might understand a little more why I loved it so much. That’s the best I can do. Read the book. It deserves more attention. It certainly had my vote for the Bailey’s prize.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders got lots of prepublication buzz. So original and unexpected and really really good. I thought the plot synopsis sounded good and I have read a few of Anders’ pieces on i09 and really liked them so I figured, why not take a chance? I hopped on the library list and got in pretty early in the queue for a change. I am not going to fall in the with the “it’s so amazing and original” crowd because I didn’t think it was either of those. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked the book, it was an enjoyable read and the plot was a little out of the ordinary but not so far out I’d call it original.

What is the plot? It follows the lives of Laurence and Patricia from childhood to their mid-twenties. Both of them have insanely draconian parents that I found a bit hard to believe. Patricia and Laurence are both a little odd. Laurence is a super computer genius kid who builds a two-second time-travel watch he found the specs for on the internet. When he decides to go to Boston to see a rocket launch from MIT but doesn’t tell his parents, he meets the designers of the rocket who are all impressed with this little kid and who give him hope that one day he might do great things. His parents aren’t so pleased. They send him to a school where discipline in strict and rote memorization is the teaching method of choice. Laurence’s parents also decide he spends too much time indoors, and somehow are completely clueless that he is building a super computer in his closet (do they not look at their electric bill and wonder why it is so high?), so they regularly send him to outdoor adventure camps.

Patricia has an older sister who likes to terrorize small animals, chopping the heads of birds and squirrels and other creatures. She’s a demented serial killer in the making. But because she follows her parents’ rules and gets good grades in school she is the favorite child. Patricia doesn’t like rules and spends far too much time running wild in the woods behind her house. While trying to save a bird with a hurt wing from her sister, Patricia learns she can understand bird language. The bird asks her to take him to the Parliament Tree so off Patricia goes, deep into the woods. She eventually finds the Tree, the Tree speaks to her, tells her she is a protector of Nature. The birds at the tree all speak to her as well, calling her a witch. When Patricia tries to find her way back home, it is well past dark and when she finally returns her parents are furious. In order to reign her in and try to make her normal, her parents send her to the same school as Laurence.

Of course neither of them fit in. Neither of them want to. They form a friendship that is fraught with outcast angst and eventual betrayal. Eventually both end up escaping from the school, Laurence to go to a special school for smart science kids, and Patricia to run away from home to attend a school for witches. Years pass before their paths cross again.

When they do meet again their values are in conflict. As a witch it is Patricia’s work to heal people, mostly without them even knowing it. But she also casts spells and hexes on people who intentionally harm others. Laurence is now working with a group of super geniuses, funded by a rich tech guy. They are working on anti-gravity. It is science versus Nature magic with both groups believing they are doing the right thing even if it might ultimately mean destroying humanity.

And that is what the book is ultimately about, science versus nature, the rational versus the wild. Patricia and Laurence are kind of like Romeo and Juliet in way, only they get a happy ending. The ending is a sort of weird melding of science and nature that is supposed to somehow save the world. Does it? We don’t get to find out for sure though we are left with a hint that the future is bright and promising.

Other than Patricia and Laurence the characters are not very well developed, their flatness is disappointing because it causes some gaps in our understanding of Patricia and Laurence and why they think and believe the way they do. The story moves along at a good pace as it changes back and forth between Patricia and Laurence. It isn’t exactly an alternating chapter kind of telling which is actually good because that would add a forced feeling to the story. Instead the alternating viewpoints have more of a flow between them that works nicely.

I was hoping for more than I got with this book, that’s the danger of buzz. I did enjoy it however, and don’t regret reading it. I suspect a good many people will like the book quite a lot. It seems to me those who don’t consider themselves avid fantasy or scifi readers would like All the Birds as it is a little bit country and a little bit rock-n-roll but not full out either one; a comfortable read for someone who wants to “try out” the genre.

Zen Cho’s book Sorcerer to the Crown has had so many people crowing about how wonderful it is that I caved in and had to find out for myself what the buzz was about. When I first started reading it I thought, uh-oh, this is so Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell-y how can this possibly not have people crying derivative! But the similarities didn’t last long and in the end it turned out to be a very different novel. Thank goodness.
 
The story is set in Regency England. English magic is on the wane and no one knows why. The British are in an uneasy truce with France agreeing that neither will use magic against the other. But there are goings on in the small nation of Janda Baik that might make things very bad for England without some careful diplomacy. It also turns out that England’s magical stores are shrinking because of some unhappy and very powerful lamiae and witches in Janda Baik. And the fairies are rather peeved at an English sorcerer who broke a treaty with them regarding taking new familiars from the land of Fairy.
 
In the world of this book anyone can have magic but of course the ones in charge, the thaumaturges, are all men and there is a definite hierarchy. Magical women are scandalous. Sure no one minds the maid or the cook using a little magic to help them in their daily duties but a female of gentle birth using magic? Girls are sent to special schools so they can learn how not to use their magic. The male thaumaturges are convinced that the female frame is too delicate for anything more than minor household magic. Are they about to get a rude awakening!
 
The very popular Sorcerer Royal, Sir Stephen, dies suddenly one night and is immediately succeeded by his protégé, Zacharias. The only problem is that Zacharias is a black man, a former slave, bought by Sir Stephen when he was a baby and brought up as if he were his own son. To be a sorcerer, one must have a familiar and the familiar of the Sorcerer Royal has been passed down from one to the other. What has happened to Sir Stephen’s familiar? Rumors spread that Zacharias killed both of them. To add even more complications to his situation, Zacharias returns from giving a speech at one of those special schools for girls with one of the girls.
 
Prunella, whose mother was Indian and father British, was orphaned young and raised by the proprietess of the school. Prunella has some powerful magical abilities that impress Zacharias so much he brings her back to London to teach her how to be a thaumaturge. Since Prunella does not have an independent fortune, she gets Zacharias to agree to have Lady Wythe, Sir Stephen’s widow, launch her into Society that she might find a husband with money. Prunella is a sassy, savvy girl who speaks her mind and has a penchant for adventure and trouble-making. Both she and Zacharias have secrets that make for all sorts of delightful twists and turns in the story.
 
Along with being a fast-paced tale full of magic and adventure and a number of I’m-not-taking-any-crap-from-you magical women, the story also very nicely weaves racial and gender issues throughout. It is done in such a subtle way too that not one of the thaumaturges who votes to remove Zacharias as Sorcerer Royal ever mentions it has anything to do with him being a black man, but as the reader you understand it has almost everything to do with it. There is also a quiet revelatory moment during which the ghost of Sir Stephen comes to understand that his protégé’s life has been very different than he had thought because the white Sir Stephen had no reason to notice all of the slights and sly remarks directed at Zacharias because of his color.

It is because of Zacharias and Prunella that the book has gotten so much attention. A fantasy novel with a hero and heroine who aren’t white and that doesn’t make excuses or tie itself into knots in order to make that happen is a big deal. That the book also manages questions of race and gender so adeptly and in such a matter-of-fact manner is also a big deal. At the same time, it is kind of sad that the race and gender of the main characters of the book are unusual enough that it has people buzzing. Hopefully one day there will be so much diversity in books that it is no longer such a newsworthy item.

Sorcerer to the Crown is Zen Cho’s first novel and she is a little surprised I think by its popularity. Born and raised in Malaysia, Cho moved to the UK to pursue a law degree. She began practicing law in the UK, got married and a couple years ago started writing the novel. She had been writing short stories and fan fiction, had even done some editing so she wasn’t a complete novice. She still practices law part time, at least according to one interview I read. And she is at work on another novel, purportedly one that takes place in the same world as Sorcerer but with different main characters, though Cho has said Zacharias and Prunella will make an appearance.

I found Sorcerer to the Crown a delightful book. It is well paced and plotted, the characters aren’t always so very three-dimensional but they are interesting and definitely not cardboard cutouts. Sometimes Prunella seems a bit too wise to the ways of the world and society and just a smidge too composed for her age and upbringing, but her sass and confidence are contagious and make it easy to overlook the other things. Quite the debut, it will be fun to follow Cho’s career and see where she goes from here.

Even with the success of Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Game of Thrones and so many other genre books over the last years the genre wars are apparently still raging. The latest salvo has come from Kazuo Ishiguro. With the release of his book The Buried Giant (one of my favorite books last year), the criticism the book received for its fantasy elements came up in a recent interview.

Unfortunately, it seems this interview is behind a subscription firewall so I can only go by what the articles, mainly The Independent, report about the interview.

It seems what is getting folks up in arms is Ishiguro’s comments that educational systems have been for a long time focused on conformity and turning people into productive citizens to grow the economy:

Education’s task was to get pupils to abandon the fantasy that comes naturally to children and prepare them for the demands of the workforce.

Ishiguro suggests there is a reason why geeks, who as a group tend to read science fiction and fantasy, are in demand by big companies. The big companies are looking for creative thinkers and the geeks, not beholden to mimesis, are sought after people.

And perhaps that is true but I don’t think it is the whole story. I am inclined to agree with Charlie Ander’s thinking that Ishiguro has oversimplified just a bit because there is also the matter of math and coding skills to consider. I read SFF and have no problem thinking up all sorts of imaginative worlds and creatures, but Google is not going to hire me based on that and my mediocre html skills.

Still, the author of the Independent article gets a bit grouchy by declaring that while fantasy may be good to read, “life is more like bullshitty literary fiction” and he’ll put his trust in people who “think inside the box” to make decisions about how we live our lives.

Sigh.

Ishiguro doesn’t just talk about fantasy but all genre fiction and how it is not taken seriously, how it is just as valid a means of exploring human lives, feelings and relationships as “literary fiction” is. With that I am completely on board. That we even still argue over genre seems ridiculous to me. Good literature is good literature whether it is realist or fantastic, involves a murder mystery or a romance. It is convenient to use genre as a means to discuss books that partake of certain tropes and plot elements, but as a way to categorize readers or assess literary value? We really need to get over it.

Well I’ve seen Nimona by Noelle Stevenson making its rave review way around the book blog world and it was finally my turn to have a go at it. I expected I would like it very much but there was a little voice niggling just behind my left ear causing me a bit of worry. What if I am that person? The one that hates the book everyone else loves? I didn’t want it to be me.

Well, it turns out there was no cause for concern. From the first page to the last I loved this book. Briefly, it is a graphic novel. Nimona is a teenage girl and a shapeshifter. She shows up at the villain Ballister Blackheart’s lair to become his sidekick. Blackheart is not looking for a sidekick but Nimona gives herself the job anyway, and pretty soon Blackheart couldn’t get rid of her even if he tried so it’s a good thing he takes a liking to her. Blackheart is the nemesis of Goldenloin who works for The Institution. The two used to be best friends but past events changed that and now they are always fighting each other but there are rules and it is obvious the hatred doesn’t run all the way to their cores. Nimona’s arrival upsets the balance because she refuses to play by the rules. She wants to be evil but it turns out the bad guys are the good guys in this story.

The book is funny and fast-paced, the art is fantastic. Nimona is not a little twig-girl, has a mostly shaved head and the hair she does have is pink and then later purple. She makes no apologies for who she is. Sometimes she tells the truth, sometimes not, but she is always trustworthy. She is eager to do and please like a puppy, but don’t cross her or she will turn into a dragon and burn you to a crisp without regret.

The world the story takes place in is a recognizable fantasy world with knights in armor and jousts and swords. But then shake in a liberal dose of rule-breaking and you also get taser guns and electric whips, a science expo, video chat screens, and a zombie horror movie night with popcorn. You’d think such a mash-up would create chaos but Stevenson makes it work without question.

Nimona is a great rollicking good time but there are also some good lessons lurking under it all. But lessons is the wrong word because that makes it seem like the book is didactic and moralistic and it is not. Themes maybe? Friendship most definitely. And what friendship means, like support and encouragement but also accepting someone for who they are no matter what and not trying to turn them into someone else. Also, forgiveness.

The story in itself is complete but it is left open at the end just enough to suggest we might see Nimona again sometime. I sure hope we do!

What a great end to a fantastic trilogy Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie turned out to be! Since this is the third book I can’t really tell you much about it that will make sense to you if you haven’t already read the first three. And if you have read the first ones but not gotten to this one yet, I don’t want to spoil anything because, wow! are there some great surprises!

There are some general observations I can make though. Fleet Captain Breq, who is also the last remaining piece of the ship Justice of Torren, is as fantastic as ever. She has some wonderful character developing moments that made me love her even more.

Also, did I miss it in the first two books? But there is a lot of great understated humor in this book. Much of it happens in interactions between ships/AIs, humans and an alien ambassador who thinks drinking a cup of fish sauce is the most delicious thing ever. Also there is a hilarious bit that involves a deep space version of the beloved road trip song, 99 Bottles of Beer.

The plotting is tight. The writing is great. The political maneuverings between all the involved parties is delightful. That’s the thing that really does it for me with a good space opera. I’m not into the shoot ‘em up kinds of planet conquering space opera stories. What I love most are the kind with intricate politics and secrets and relationships and trying to figure out who is on whose side, who will be dependable when it comes down to the wire and who is going to be the traitor. The Ancillary books tick off all my happy check boxes.

It was a truly satisfying conclusion and a reader can’t ask for more than that.

If you like science fiction and have not read Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy, I can’t recommend it enough.

I was AWOL from blogging last night because Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie arrived for me at the library and, well, had to dive in! You understand. I’ve been waiting my turn for this since the beginning of October when it was published. But I have been anticipating reading this third and final book in the series since I read the second book back in February.

When the first two books in a trilogy are really good there is always the fear that the third book conclusion might go awry. But I am feeling confident that it will all end spectacularly. Within half a page I was into the book and didn’t want to put it down. Hooray! If only I could have called off from work today and stayed home to read. But what do you say? Sorry, can’t come work today because I am reading a really good book? I so rarely get sick that if I tried to lie and say I was ill, no one would be believe it especially when I turned up the next day looking hale and hearty (though perhaps a little tired from staying up late to finish the book). Besides, I am bad at telling lies anyway and the guilt ruins it all.

Before I go off to read more of this amazing book, I have to tell you about the little pile of other books that came along with this one.

Last week on a gardening blog with holiday gift suggestions, one of the items was a book called Gardening for Geeks. As a geek and a gardener I had to borrow it from the library! But that’s not all.

Now, I’ve had a library card in the Hennepin County library system for as long as I have lived here. I have been requesting library books online for as long as there has been the ability to do so. Why, why, have I never noticed the “related books” stream of book covers? Probably because it is lower down on the page, below the fold so to speak, and I never had occasion to scroll down. For some reason when I was requesting Gardening for Geeks I scrolled down and found this glorious thing!

And then I went crazy.

Oh, that looks like a good book. I’ll request that. That looks good too! Oh yes and that one. I wonder what that one is about? Request. Request. Request.

I now have a tidy pile of gardening books on sustainability, maximizing your food harvest, and DIY green projects that will very likely make me want to install my own solar panels and create wind turbines that also serve as trellises for pole beans. I already really want to build a solar food dehydrator, I don’t need further encouragement.

Since I will have two weeks off very soon I tell myself that I am just stocking up for vacation. And I am. But I also have to remind myself that we need to finish building the chicken coop with its green roof before undertaking any additional projects. Looks like I will be studying up and making a future project list! Bookman has been warned.

Hop over to Shiny New Books for my review of Jo Walton’s The Just City. Here is a taste:

Aside from The Death of Socrates and a few other pieces forced on me in school, I can’t say I have ever been interested in reading Plato. That Jo Walton’s novel The Just City made me download The Republic to my Kobo is unprecedented. I haven’t actually begun reading it yet, but hey, one step at a time.

Why this response to Walton’s book? The Just City is Walton’s take on what might happen if Plato’s Republic went from thought experiment to reality.

There is lots of other new stuff to check out while you are there. Who knows, you might find one more book to put on your list for Santa or the perfect book to gift the person who seems to have read everything.

I have never read Kim Stanley Robinson before even though I have heard good things about him. Now that I have read Aurora, I know I’ll be reading more.

This is a science fiction story that is often heavy on the science. I don’t mind though because I do enjoy thinking about the consequences of long distance space travel. Even though Aurora takes place several centuries in the future, it is not one of those science fiction stories in which the science is more like magic and solves all our problems. The book is about a generation ship, a ship consisting of ecological biomes and about 2,000 people who were sent out to settle the stars. Humans at the time the ship was sent out had begun having success settling the solar system and believed they were ready to expand further.

After 170 years of traveling to the distant Tau Ceti system, the ship has finally arrived. Of course those arriving were not the ones who volunteered for the trip and a good many on the ship are pissed off that their predecessors chose their lives for them. They have been in what has begun to feel like a prison for a very long time and are ready to leave and settle this supposedly dead moon that has still managed to have water and oxygen.

There is a lot they have to figure out. The days and nights are not equal to Earth days and nights but are much longer. How do they adapt the plants they brought with them to such a day/night cycle? The moon they are to colonize also has a constant wind blowing, not a gentle breeze, but often hard enough to knock people over. They are also beginning to suffer the effects of having such a small genetic pool. Not to mention the systems in the ship itself are showing larger and larger metabolic rifts. But these humans are determined to make a go of it for no other reason than they can’t bear to live on the ship any longer.

But it turns out the planet is not dead after all. One of the landing crew is infected with something after she sinks in some mud and cuts her leg. Soon all of the people who had been on the surface setting up the foundations of the new settlement are sick and dying. The virus is completely alien and no one knows how to stop it. Within a week all 70 of the people who were on the moon are dead. Those on the ship have a decision to make. There are those who want to stay in the Tau Ceti system and try again on another moon. The other half of the population wants to go back to Earth because this colonizing the stars things is a bunch of baloney. In the end half stay and half return to Earth. It is the group that decides to return to Earth that the book follows from here.

It took me a while to warm up to the book but I am glad I stuck with it. The reason it was hard is because the main narrator is the ship’s AI which came into “consciousness” because of one of the crew members. As the ship learns to tell the story of its humans there is much musing over language and how inadequate it is, about metaphors and how imprecise they are, that kind of thing. AIs trying to figure out human language is not all that interesting to me and it felt sometimes like it was just an opportunity for Robinson to do his own musing through the mouthpiece of the ship.

But then something clicked and I can’t say what. And Ship began to grow on me until Ship becomes a full character in its own right. The ship trying to figure things out doesn’t stop. Eventually the ship starts to wonder about what it means to be conscious and of course, by extension, what it means to be human.

There is also a lot in the book about ecosystems and balance, the needs of the many versus the needs of the few, about choices and who gets to make them and what the consequences of choices are and who has to face them. It is also really interesting that a book about settling the stars kind of ends up being against it. Not against exploration per se, but there is the suggestion that because humans evolved on Earth that is the place they are suited to live and no other. Sure, we may eventually create colonies on other planets in our solar system, but in the book even the people living on the colonies have to return to Earth every ten years or so for their mental and physical health. It is a pleasantly subtle and different way to emphasize that Earth is our home and we need to take care of it for all our sakes.

A good and thought-provoking book. Well written and completely plausible. I recommend it to anyone who likes think-y science fiction with actual science in it.

What a marvelously fun book is Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory! Steampunk meets the old west in fictional gold rush town Rapid City on the west coast of the United States. From the very beginning the book charges ahead full speed without hardly a lull. And the cast of characters! There is Karen, our narrator and heroine, somewhere around aged seventeen, who was raised on a ranch by her father (her mother died) who gentled horses. Karen herself is quite the horsewoman but when her father is accidentally killed while working with a wild colt, Karen is left orphaned and unable to run her father’s ranch alone. She sells it all to pay his debts and moves to Rapid City where she gets a job working at a high class brothel.

Madame treats the women well and they all get a share of the profits. Karen is saving up so she can one day have her own ranch. In the meantime, life isn’t so very bad. Madame’s is like one big family and the customers are mostly regulars with plenty of money and include the mayor of Rapid City and many of the police officers.

Peter Bantle runs a brothel too but he does not treat the women well at all. Many of them are “hired” under dubious circumstances. Bantle has a taste for violence and so do many of his customers. He also decides he is going to run for mayor. He has created some gadgets to fight his enemies including a glove that electrocutes people and a mind control machine.

Bantle’s enemies of course turn out to be Madame and her girls.

Also in the cast is U.S. Marshall Bass Reeves. Reeves is a freed slave. He comes to town with his posseman who is a Comanche Indian. They are on the trail of a murdered who has been killing women, specifically prostitutes, across the country.

All the storylines come together eventually to create one great fun climactic battle with horses and guns and dynamite and a submarine with octopus arms and a sewing machine that is like no sewing machine you can ever imagine.

In the midst of this story Bear manages to focus on creating some wonderfully rounded characters including Miss Francina who happens to be transgendered and is never called anything but Miss Francina and referred to always as “she” and no one ever remarks on it at all. There is even a wonderful romance story between Karen and Priya, a girl slightly older than Karen who is rescued from Peter Bantle’s brothel. Priya and her sister left India to come to the United States to work and send money home to their family after their father’s business disastrously falls to pieces. But they get cheated and swept up by a broker who sells them to Bantle. Priya ends up being a favorite of Bantles and becomes familiar with just how much damage his electrified glove can do.

Karen is smart and savvy and ever so practical and matter-of-fact. And she tells a great story in a most colorful manner. Here is a little taste:

I waited, counting Mississippis, and made it to forty-one before the back door came open. Bless city houses and brass hinges and capitalist pork-barrel bastards who can afford staff to keep them oiled. The leather hinges on Da’s kitchen door would of let the door drag and in the wet of Rapid most metal hinges quickly learned squeak and stick, but this door opened in silent as a jaw gaping. And weren’t that an unsettling image?

She comes out with some delightful turns of phrase throughout the book that left me giggling and clapping my hands in pleasure. I can’t recommend the book enough.

This is the first Elizabeth Bear book I have read and I can tell you, it definitely won’t be the last!

As I mentioned before, Jo Walton’s book Among Others struck me as a kind of fictional version of her book of essays What Makes This Book So Great. But Among Others isn’t just chit chat about science fiction and fantasy books in the context of a novel, it is more than that.

The story is told in the form of a diary, but the diary is being written as a kind of memoir. The diary’s author is 15-year-old Mori and the entries date from fall of 1979 to spring of 1980. Mori, who is Welsh, has recently been sent to live with her father whom she has never seen before. He lives in England with his three sisters and they all decide to send Mori to boarding school. We don’t know much at first about why Mori was sent to live with her father, but as the entries pile up, we learn she had a twin sister who was killed not long ago when the two of them, with the help of the fairies, stopped their insane mother from doing some evil magic.

If you are opposed to fairies and magic in your books then don’t bother reading this one. If you are on the fence about them, it might help to know that this isn’t Harry Potter-type magic and the fairies aren’t the prettied up Disney kind. And while the fairies and the magic are a big part of the story, they are not THE story. Because the novel is actually about Mori dealing with the grief of losing her sister and figuring out who she is without her and who she wants to become. Mori is a smart girl, but even smart girls don’t know everything.

You might think the others in the title are the fairies, but that is not the case. Mori escapes a very bad home environment with her mother and in the process is forced to leave behind all of her friends, her beloved aunt and her grandfather to live among other people she does not know. The others are her father and his sisters and the girls at the boarding school. It is an entirely new environment and situation she needs to learn to navigate on her own. She makes friends and enemies and learns a lot about herself and getting along with others; loyalty, ethics, friendship.

A main delight of the book is how important books are to Mori, not just SFF books, though those are her favorite, but books and reading in general. She makes friends with the librarian at her school and the librarians at the public library in town. She is invited to join a book group. She talks about books with her dad and she meets his father who also turns out to be a reader and they talk about books too. It is a wonderfully bookish book.

I mean, how can you not like a character when, right at the start she says:

I have books, new books, and I can bear anything

And, as the person who does all the interlibrary loans at my library, how can I not love Mori and by extension Jo Walton when she says:

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization. Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

This is the first Jo Walton novel I have read. I worried with all the love she gets that I might be disappointed because my expectations were pretty high. I shouldn’t have worried. Now I have the pleasure of knowing there are a whole bunch of Walton novels out there just waiting for me to read. Hooray!

I’ve been a little bit sad today ever since I learned this morning that Terry Pratchett died. The outpouring of love for the man and his books on the internet has been overwhelming. It also is comforting, this collective mourning of a beloved author. I can’t begin to link to everything but I thought I’d collect together a few of the places that I have liked most: Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, Jo Walton at Tor, a gathering of comments and tweets at the Guardian, a lovely mention at the Paris Review. Also at the Guardian, favorite Pratchett quotes which doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the marvelous things Pratchett said and wrote.

Writing humor is hard, writing fantasy humor is even harder. Pratchett is the only author besides Douglas Adams that has reliably made me laugh out loud reading his books. I was terribly sad when he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s a number of years ago, but yet he still managed to keep writing so his death today came as a shock.

Pratchett might be gone but at least we still have his books. And that’s something very special I think, to live on in the hearts and minds of readers around the world. Still, I’m going to miss him. As The Librarian, one of my favorite characters would say, Ook!

I loved Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie so much I was a little worried that I might be disappointed by Ancillary Sword. I began reading, holding back just a little, expecting disappointment and not wanting to invest too much but before I knew it I was in deep and happy as a clam. When I turned the last page I didn’t want it to be done. More please! There will be more. In October Ancillary Mercy will be published. I fear that will be the conclusion to the story and I will be bereft.

Ancillary Sword picks up right where Ancillary Justice left off. Breq, who is an ancillary and used to be a ship called Justice of Toren, has been given the command of Mercy of Kalr. She was given the command by the Lord of the Radch herself. Mercy of Kalr no longer has an ancillary crew, though the previous ship’s captain required all her crew to behave as if they were ancillaries. An ancillary is basically a human who has been implanted with all kinds of equipment and forced to become part of the ship’s AI. The ancillaries are soldiers but also the eyes and ears and mobile bodies controlled by the ship.

Breq in the singular is rather lonely. She could become an ancillary of Mercy of Kalr but she would then no longer be Breq. Because Breq used to be an ancillary she can communicate with Mercy of Kalr in a very different way than a human captain would be able to. All of the humans on the ships have implants that gives the ship access to their eyes and ears as well as their body’s functioning (heart rate, blood pressure, etc). The job of the ship AI is to take care of her humans. Because Breq is an ancillary, the ship can actually show her what the crew is doing through their eyes and ears. It is a small comfort to the lonely Breq.

Mercy of Kalr is sent to guard Athoek Station. On this station is the sister of the lieutenant Breq loved when she was Justice of Toren. So there is an interesting plotline there. We also have Lieutenant Tisarwat who is brand new and only seventeen, assigned to the ship by the Lord of the Radch. But Breq figures out pretty fast the Tisarwat is actually an ancillary of the Lord of the Radch and the ancillary bits are not working out so well in that body. There is also another ship, Sword of Atagaris which does still have ancillaries. The Radch empire is falling apart and there is a question about whose side Sword of Atagaris and her captain is on.

Toss into all this the continuing questions of identity that began in the first book. But add in another question — what is justice and what does it mean?

‘What is justice Citizen? […] We speak of it as though it is a simple thing, a matter of acting properly, as though it’s nothing more than an afternoon tea and the question only of who takes the last pastry. So simple. Assign guilt to the guilty.

Of course it is never simple and perfect justice can never be truly dispensed.

The writing is great. The pacing excellent. Since Breq can see and hear through the eyes of her crew (they have no idea she can do this) the perspective is constantly changing but is never confusing. It works really well for keeping all the balls in the air and all of the plotlines moving ahead together at the same time, there is no “meanwhile back at the ranch” kind of thing. Leckie does a good job of giving depth to even minor characters. And it’s just an all around great romping story. Ancillary Justice won a Hugo and a Nebula. Ancillary Sword is currently up for a Nebula. I can hardly wait for Ancillary Mercy!

Well, I soldiered on to the end of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and around page 135 (of 172) a woman appears! She is the young and beautiful wife of a petty tyrant with big aspirations who married her only because her father has money and power in the Empire. She, of course, is an unhappy woman with a sharp tongue, always pestering her husband with how dumb he is and threats of telling her father. She suggests she will leave her husband and he threatens her with violence:

‘Well, now, I’ll tell you what my lady. Perhaps you would enjoy returning to your native world. Except that, to retain as a souvenir that portion of you with which I am best acquainted, I could have your tongue cut out first. And,’ he rolled his head, calculatingly, to one side, ‘as a final improving touch to your beauty, your ears and the tip of your nose as well.’

But don’t worry, it all comes right when he gives her some fancy jewelry like no other that any woman at the big party will have that night. She immediately shuts up and starts admiring herself in the mirror, then goes away happy.

And very late in the book almost at the end, we are told that war with another planet will be avoided in part because the small, nuclear powered household appliances they have been buying from the Foundation for several years will begin running out of power (the appliances all have tiny individual nuclear power generators like a fancy battery). This other world will not go to war with the Foundation because they won’t be able to get any more of the things they have come to rely on. The women will start complaining when their nuclear knives no longer work, when their stoves begin to fail and when their washers stop doing a good job at cleaning.

Oy.

Foundation is made up of a collection of five short stories that appeared between 1942 and 1944 in Astounding Magazine. They were collected together into a book and published in 1951. This became the first book in the Foundation Trilogy which later expanded with prequels and sequels and is now known as the Foundation Series.

The prose is fairly pedestrian and the plots aren’t all that interesting. Even though the stories deal with a series of crises, there isn’t really any threat of failure because, as we are told over and over, it was all already predicted by Hari Seldon, the great psychohistorian and cruncher of numbers. Where’s the tension when predestination is at play?

One of the more interesting things about the stories is how the Foundation, made up of a bunch of scientists, in order to survive and conquer, has turned science into a religion with priests and rituals and all the trappings. The priests and acolytes are trained in science enough to be able to maintain things like power grids and perform minor “miracles” but not know enough to actually “do” science on their own. They pretty much believe the whole religion scenario. The high ranking muckity-mucks are actual scientists who are in on the scam, constantly working to perpetuate it and to spread the Foundation’s dominance across their little corner of the galaxy through it. Domination by science through the vehicle of religion.

My main amusement while reading the book, however, was the invented slang and swearing. How can things like “son-of-a-spacer” and “I don’t care an electron” not arouse a giggle or at least a smirk? And exclamations like “space knows!” and “by space!” pepper conversations and is intended to sound so futuristic and scientific. It was almost worth it just for that. Almost.

Still, though I found it all a giant dud, I am glad to have read it. At least I know what it is about now even if I don’t understand why it’s so popular and considered a classic. Maybe the other books sort it out better but I have no interest in reading them so I guess my understanding will remain incomplete. I’m okay with that.

It’s been so long since I’ve read a right and proper, complex, deliciously well-written space opera that when I finished Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie I broke my no new library requests until the end of February ban and put myself on the list for the next book, Ancillary Sword. I’m number 4 so I hope I don’t have to wait so very long. I already mentioned how the book plays with gender. It stopped being so weird after awhile to have everyone be “she” and slipped right into the background.

What’s the book actually about? It’s a complex story with lots of interlocking pieces. Breq, our narrator, used to be a troop carrier, a ship called Justice of Toren. Breq, or rather One Esk segment nineteen, is an ancillary or Justice of Toren, a human body connected to the AI of the ship. The troops Justice of Toren carries are all ancillaries of herself. They are all connected and can see and hear what is going on through each segment and Justice of Toren controls them all. The Ship has consciousness and her human crew, the captain of the ship and various lieutenants in charge of the brigades of ancillaries have implants that allow them and Justice of Toren to communicate directly to each other. The humans think the ship is just a computer but they are mistaken. Ships have favorites, and Justice of Toren’s favorite is Lieutenant Awn. Got all that?

So the first half or so of the book moves back and forth between present and twenty years ago. Twenty years ago Breq/One Esk was with Lieutenant Awn on the planet of Shis’urna, a planet that the Radch, an ever expanding empire, had annexed. They had been on the planet for five years, making nice with the new citizens and helping them adjust to being part of the Radch empire. Everything was going pretty well until it wasn’t. It turns out there is a pot afoot involving the ruler of the Radch empire, Anaander Mianaai who herself is made up of no one knows how many ancillaries. I’m pretty sure the original Anaander was human but she has lived on for thousands of years through her numerous ancillaries, expanding her empire and growing ever more powerful.

In the present, Justice of Toren was destroyed and Breq is all that is left of the ship. She is on a mission, out to take revenge against the one who destroyed her. People from the past keep showing up and she has to work hard to hide who she really is or else her plans will all be ruined. She is pretty sure she will end up dead when all is said and done. Does she get her revenge in the end? Yes and no. Does she die? She comes pretty darn close. And instead of the end she thought it all would be, it turns out to be only the beginning. I said this was a space opera right?

So great plot. Great pacing. Lots of cool stuff. But the best part is that is not all of the book. Because the book is also about empire and politics and class and war, about following orders (or not) and taking responsibility for your actions. And most of all, it is about identity. Breq is Breq and One Esk segment nineteen and Justice of Toren. She is not human but is often more human than the humans. She struggles with being lonely since until twenty years ago she has never been an “I” and never been alone. She discovers that while she is now singular, she is not actually alone. Breq also often battles with and is hindered by emotions. She makes choices she doesn’t fully understand. She is a spark about to ignite the dry tinder that the Radch Empire has become.

Bookman has been after me for quite some time — a few years — to read The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. It’s the best fantasy I’ve read since Lord of the Rings, he says. I’m pretty sure that was a bit of hyperbole to get me to read the book because now that I have read it I’ll say it’s really good but not the best thing since Lord of the Rings good.

Part of my reluctance to read the book was that it’s one of those multi-book epic fantasy sagas and while those are enjoyable from time to time, I much prefer stand-alones. But now I find myself working through all the Game of Thrones books (only have one more before I’m caught up and waiting for the next one with the rest of the world) and now I’m committed to the Kingkiller Chronicle of which Name of the Wind is the first. The second in the series was published in 2011 and a short side story book was published in 2014. It’s a good thing the second book is even fatter than the first one, I will have plenty of time before I find myself caught up and waiting for the next book.

So what’s Name of the Wind about anyway? It’s about a big red-headed man named Kvothe (pronounced like “quothe”). He’s an innkeeper in a backwater farming town. Except he’s not really an innkeeper. He’s in disguise. He’s actually a hero who has songs and stories written about him. We aren’t quite sure why he’s masquerading as an innkeeper but he’s been at it for a little over a year. Except things are starting to happen, rumors filtering in and strange, huge spider-like creatures attacking people on the roads.

One day Chronicler arrives at the inn. Chronicler is a very famous historian-type person come to find Kvothe and get the true story behind all the songs and legends. Kvothe reluctantly agrees, and so begins his tale of when he was a boy in a troupe of traveling players. His father was head of the troupe and they sang and performed plays and did all sorts of things that traveling troupes do. Kvothe is an extremely bright boy and picks things up faster and more easily than anyone else. One day an arcanist joins the troupe. An arcanist is someone who has trained at the university, knows magic and other things. Ben had healing skills and could also do some great things with lighting which made him a welcome addition to the troupe. He began teaching Kvothe math and chemistry and history and eventually, magic. By the time Ben met a woman and decided to marry her and leave the troupe, Kvothe was more skilled than a good many students who had been studying several years at the university.

Kvothe’s idyllic childhood comes crashing to an end when he returns to the caravan one evening, after having been sent out by his mother to gather some herbs and told to take his time, to find everyone in the troupe killed and all the wagons burned. The men that did the nasty work were still there, sitting by his parents’ campfire and saw Kvothe. He would have been a goner too but was saved by the approach of some mysterious something or other approaching in the dark night sky.

Orphaned and alone, Kvothe eventually ends up living on the streets in a mean city for several years before he finally manages to come into enough money to allow him to travel to the University and attempt to become admitted. Of course he is even though he is only fifteen at this point. And of course he is still poor and he makes friends and enemies and has adventures and gets into trouble. He is still at university when the book ends, but it ends in a good place, one that leaves you feeling satisfied but also wanting more.

Now, if you decide to read this book you should know that this is one of those stories where the first hundred pages are slow going and sometimes downright boring. It’s a slow build. But by the end it fairly barrels along at near breakneck speed. The writing is at times a bit uneven, especially in the first half of the book. Once the momentum gets going the writing improves too and everything eventually clicks together for a great fun read that I had a hard time putting down. I’ll be taking a little break before I venture into the next book, probably during the summer months. I do, after all, have that Games of Thrones book to read.

I’m in the middle of reading Ann Leckie’s fantastic book Ancillary Justice. One of the things I like about it so much is that it plays with our gender expectations. The story takes place in a fictional universe in which the Radch regularly annex planets to their empire. The language spoken by the Radch has no gender, it does not recognize male or female anything. This presents a conundrum for Leckie since English requires gender designations. How do you translate? Leckie has decided to make the default pronoun “she” serve for everyone.

The story is told from the point of view of Breq who used to be a starship. She knows many different languages but she is Radch and as such always has trouble figuring out gender when speaking a language that requires it.

What is super-duper fascinating is to read everything through the “she” pronoun. I picture all the characters as women and there is nothing in any of the characters’ actions that give away what their biology might be. Nor does anyone get described as curvy or beautiful or brawny or any of the other myriad ways gender and biology get marked. Everyone is just people who happen to be referred to as “she” when a pronoun is required. But, as I said, I keep picturing all the characters as women because that is what “she” asks me to do in English.

So you might be able to imagine then how disconcerted I was while reading last night to discover an important character is actually a biological male. He was only referred to as “he” once in a conversation Breq was having with someone in a gendered language and then it is right back to “she” again. My brain went all wobbly trying to replace a she with a he but it didn’t last long. The further I got away from “he” and the more “she’s” that got piled on in referring to this character, my mind reverted right back to picturing a woman.

The cool thing is there is no reason why all the characters couldn’t actually be women. In the context of this world, there is no question about whether a woman can lead an army or captain a starship or beat the crap out of someone or rule the empire or do anything else. Gender is not recognized and when there are no gender boxes to fill it is amazing what kinds of other things can be focused on instead.

Reading a book in which “she” stands in for the universal gender points out how fallacious English is to insist that “he” can be used as a universal pronoun meaning men and women. It can’t and it doesn’t and I never believed that it did. Whenever I’m reading and come across a “universal he” I am always brought up short. I have to stop and take the time to mentally insert myself into the equation because “he” is not me. I wonder, any men reading this, when you come across “universal he” do you think, oh that means men and women? When you see “he” standing in for everyone do you picture everyone as being male? And if you are a male who has read Ancillary Justice, what was your experience reading a book where everyone is “she”?

I can’t begin to say what a pleasure it is to read a book like Ancillary Justice. It’s no surprise Leckie won the Nebula and the Hugo for it. I can’t wait to find out how it ends and I am greatly looking forward to reading the second book, Ancillary Sword.

And now for something a little different, a graphic story/comic featuring a group of four female mercenaries who are tough, sassy, smart, funny, like to drink and eat and carouse, and know how to handle weaponry and magic. Rat Queens, Volume One: Sass and Sorcery by Kurtis Wiebe is a hoot and a half.

There is Betty, a Smidgin thief. I’m not sure what a Smidgin is, but she’s little and cute, great at breaking and entering, and enjoys being tossed at goblins, swords blazing. There is Dee, a former acolyte of N’rygoth, a giant flying squid. Dee is black, has some good magic, a great purple and black outfit and awesome thigh-high boots. Violet is a solidly built redhead with great armor and big attitude. Turns out she is a Dwarf who shaved her beard off and left her family. We aren’t sure why she left her family but I suspect in later stories we might find out. And finally, there is the leader of the group, Hannah, who is a magic user and, I believe, an Elf, but don’t quote me on that. She’s tall and curvy and looks a bit like Betty Page.

The Rat Queens and four other mercenary groups have been banned from the town of Palisade after their last pub brawl unless they all perform assigned services to the city. The Rat Queens are tasked with clearing out a goblin cave. Peaches are assigned to empty a camp of bandits. The Four Daves have to go deal with the restless dead at the cemetery. The Brother Ponies (four big, brawny men with long ponytails) are given the job of getting rid of the ogre. And finally, Obsidian Darkness, who look sort of like goth ninja elves, have to clean the toilets at the military barracks.

The jobs turn out to be a setup. The Rat Queens survive, a bit battered and bruised, but all in one piece. The other groups aren’t all so lucky. Who is behind the setup to have them killed? Will the Rat Queens and the remaining mercenaries from the other groups be able to stop brawling long enough to band together and save the city of Palisade? Will Betty and the cute Fay with the nose ring hook up? Will Dee be able to get her nose out a book and get over her social anxiety long enough to realize she has a few admirers? What’s with all the bluebirds in one of the Four Daves’ beards?

Part of the fun of this book is not just the women kicking ass, but that they are friends and care about each other without having to go shopping for new shoes or weep together over a bucket of ice cream. There are also many moments about accepting other people for who they are, getting past being different and seeing the individual instead of the Zombie or the Dwarf. And it’s just plain silly fun. There is currently only one volume. It looks like volume two will be out in May. Yay!

With all the excitement that buzzed around the internet over the publication of the final installment in Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy I decided that it might be worth giving the books a go. I borrowed the first book, The Magicians from the library and eagerly began to read.

The book had an interesting start, high school senior Quentin Coldwater and his two friends, all three extremely smart and planning on being admitted to top universities, are dressed up to attend interviews for said universities. Quentin and James each have an appointment with the same interviewer but when they arrive at the house in Brooklyn they find the man dead. But something doesn’t add up. They call the police and one of the paramedics hands the pair large envelopes as she leaves. James refuses his, too freaked out by the day’s events. Quentin takes his and so begins the first step of his new life.

Besides being smart, Quentin is also gifted in slight of hand magic tricks and obsessed with Fillory, a series of books he has read over and over again since childhood. Fillory is very much a Chronicles of Narnia sort of series of books. But the children are named Chatwin and instead of Aslan there are two rams, Ember and Umber who oversee Fillory. It all felt very silly to me and I kept wishing every time Fillory was brought up that Aslan would come bounding in and liven things up with a few swipes of his big lion paw.

But I get ahead of myself. In the envelope Quentin receives is in invitation to sit for exams at a wizard school, Brakebills. Quentin passes and instead of attending Harvard or Yale, he is now going to college to learn how to be a real magician. There were some interesting bits but as with Fillory, I couldn’t stop thinking Harry Potter does this better. While Hogwarts is a grade school thing, Brakebills is college. Instead of Quidditch there is Welters. Instead of houses there are specialized areas of study which are their own kind of “house.” Quentin is a “Physical kid.” Physical magic being one of the more difficult areas, the group is very small. With the addition of Quentin and the smart and talented and pretty but introverted Alice, the group numbers seven.

And so we follow Quentin and Alice through their four years at Brakebills which would normally be five but they are so smart and talented they get jumped ahead a year. There are minor adventures and some interesting things that happen but it kind of all drags on a bit.

At this point I was debating whether I should even bother finishing the book. I decided to keep going. I thought there must be some kind of payoff since the series is so popular. And the last third of the book did pick up and get pretty good. I can’t say that it redeemed the first two-thirds of the book, but I ended up feeling okay about it instead of wondering why I had bothered. Besides the story in the first part of the book feeling unoriginal, the writing itself is frequently clunky. It manages to get better by the end, or maybe the plot just got better so I wasn’t paying as much attention to the writing itself?

I am far from loving the book and being excited enough about it to tell everyone I know to read it. However, I liked it enough to be willing to give the next book, The Magician King, a go. I won’t be doing this any time soon, I need to get a little distance from The Magicians in order to make a fresh approach at book two. Perhaps over the summer.

Thanksgiving laziness came upon me early. No not laziness exactly because I have managed to finish two books I was in the middle of and get to the halfway mark of another book I had not even begun until Wednesday and that I need to finish by Sunday so I can return it to the library Monday. Plus there has been a couple inches of snow to shovel and the coldest Thanksgiving in 29 years to eat my way through. And Waldo and Dickens have been piling on top of me and oh, the mean looks they shoot at me should I dare to move! But enough excuses, let’s get to one of those books I finished reading.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel has been getting lots of buzz in the U.S. and in blogland. As a post-apocalypse novel it falls into the genre of science fiction which made it the first science fiction novel to make it to the shortlist of the National Book Awards. It didn’t win, but that’s ok.

To say that Station Eleven is a post-apocalypse novel will likely give you some immediate assumptions. While civilization as we know it has come to an end due to a global epidemic of a highly contagious and fast acting strain of swine flu that kills around 90% of the world’s population, this is no doom and gloom story. It is not The Road or Oryx and Crake or Mad Max. It is a more hopeful book than that and in some ways feels truer because of it, though it could only be wishful thinking on my part.

The focus of the book is on the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors who travel in a horse-drawn caravan along a fairly regular route on the coast of Lake Michigan in what used to be the state of Michigan. On the lead caravan is painted a quote from Star Trek Voyager: “Because survival is insufficient.” It is the Symphony’s motto and it keeps them going through the worst of times. Along with the music, the actors perform Shakespeare plays. Early on they had tried to perform other plays but everywhere they went people preferred Shakespeare so now that is all they do. The world, however, is not completely safe. The Symphony travels armed, with scouts fore and aft, and sets guards around their camp in the evenings.

The book begins in an undated present with the famous actor Arthur Leander playing Lear on stage in Toronto. In the second half of the play he collapses and dies on stage from a heart attack. There were three young girls in the play acting as hallucinatory visions of Lear’s daughters are children. One of those girls, Kirsten aged eight, had befriended Arthur. She survives the flu epidemic and ends up with the Symphony. Much of the post-flu story belongs to Kirsten, but other stories are woven in as well.

Pre-flu, the story belongs mostly to Arthur Leander, his acting career, his three wives, his best friend Clark. It is Arthur and the lives he touched that spin out the story both pre and post flu. The book moves back and forth in time between Arthur pre-epidemic and Kirsten twenty years after the epidemic as well as a couple other characters that flesh things out and add additional angles and dimensions. The transitions are beautifully fluid and nearly seamless. The plotting intricate and detailed. A story like this could so easily feel forced and fake as the author directs all the various elements to fit together no matter what, but there was hardly a clunker to be found.

I loved that the story makes some wonderful observations and asks some interesting questions. Since it is now twenty years after the epidemic there are an interesting mix of people, older adults who remember everything that has been lost, adults who were children at the time like Kirsten who have fading memories of electricity and cars and flying in airplanes but didn’t know quite enough of the world to feel that they had lost so very much. And now there are children who have been born in the aftermath, who know nothing of what the world was except from the stories the adults tell and from pictures in books. At one point someone questions whether they should even teach the children about what the world was like before. His young daughter is upset and angry upon learning that lifespans were so much longer before due to all the medical technology and medicines available and is devastated by the unfairness of it all.

There are terrifying moments of watching the world come to an end. Jeevan and his brother Frank are holed up in Frank’s Toronto apartment. Jeevan, getting a tip from a doctor friend at the hospital just as the flu hit Toronto, had time to buy shopping carts full of supplies and haul them to his brother’s high rise building and from the windows they watch the world fall apart:

On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. no one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no on removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.

The title of the book comes from the title of a comic book in the story, Station Eleven. Station Eleven is a space station designed as a planet. The station/planet has been badly damaged from a wormhole and the inhabitants of the station are fighting to survive and find a way to get back home. This comic plays an important role in the novel but it doesn’t become completely clear until the end.

As scary and realistic as the book’s premise is, this is not a depressing dystopian kind of book. Bad things happen in it but it ends on a hopeful note. If you are not a general fan of science fiction or post-apocalyptic novels this one is different enough that you just might enjoy it. And if you are a fan of this sort of book, well, it’s a real treat and a breath of fresh air in what is generally a genre composed of a pile-up of horrors.

For a bit of background on the book from the author, be sure to read her short interview with the National Book Foundation.

I read my first China Miéville book a couple years ago, The City and the City. Imagine two cities with different cultures and architecture existing in the same space. So, for instance, you live in one city but your next door neighbor lives in the other city. You see each other coming and going but you live in two different cities and you are not allowed to even acknowledge you see one another or the government will come and take you away for reconditioning. But that is not what the book is about, that is just the setting. The book is actually a police procedural. Trippy, right?

So when I sat down to read my second ever Miéville, Perdido Street Station, I was prepared to be plunged into something richly imagined but I had no idea what. The thing I like about reading Miéville is that you do just plunge in. He has created an incredibly detailed world with geography and beings of different races each with their own history and cultures but he doesn’t just tell you about it, he lets you experience it in the context of the story. This makes the beginning of his novels both exciting (you never know what you might discover) and hard going (you have no idea what is going on). If you are going to read Miéville, you have to be okay with total immersion and the confusion and uncertainty that goes along with it. Eventually you will know everything you need to know, you just have to wait and pay attention.

And so at the beginning of Perdido Street Station we find ourselves arriving by boat on a filthy river with a stranger to a city called New Crobuzon. And then the narrative shifts to Isaac and Lin and we don’t know who this stranger is for a number of chapters. But we don’t know who Isaac and Lin are either. Through the story we learn Isaac is human and Lin is Khepri, a humanoid woman body with an insectoid head, and the pair are lovers. Prejudice against inter-species love abound and so we start to think that this is going to be a love story of sorts about breaking through boundaries. And it is that, but that does not turn out to be the main story.

The main story congeals around Isaac a scientist semi-attached to the university but no longer really welcome there because his research is just too far out of the realm of what anyone believes is possible. Except it isn’t. And his far out research ends up in a breakthrough that eventually saves the entire city of New Corbuzon from being destroyed by slake moths, nightmare creatures escaped from government control that suck the consciousness out of sentient beings leaving them as living vegetables.

The book manages to be a romance, a thriller, science fiction, and horror all rolled into one. And it works. It really works. Miéville is always in control and no matter how weird the story gets or uncertain the reader might start to feel about making sense of it all, you can trust Miéville and so relax and enjoy the ride. This is speculative science fiction at its best, a substantial story, complex and intricately told. His vocabulary is one that sent me to the dictionary again and again. It’s smart and makes demands of the reader. And as alien as the world and the story turn out to be, it is all so richly detailed with such a sense of depth to it that it feels real and you believe in the places and peoples and histories and cultures. It really is astonishing.

If you don’t read a lot of science fiction, I wouldn’t recommend this book to you, however, if you are an avid SF fan or even read it now and then and feel comfortable in an SF world, definitely give this book a try. It is worth all the effort you will have to put into it.

I was MIA yesterday because I thought I could finish reading The Word Exchange by Alena Gradeon really quick and even blog about it, but it turned out I had more pages than I thought left. Now, just now I have finished it. Why such a hurry? It was due back at the library on Tuesday. My apologies to the next person in line waiting for their turn, I hope you understand.

Having just finished the book I haven’t had time to digest but since it will be going back to the library ASAP I thought I’d better write about it before I no longer had it in my hands. So forgive me if this turns out choppy and not quite all the way thought out.

The time is the not too distant future. We’ve gone from smart phones to a device called a “Meme.” Memes are pocket-sized devices that come with headphones and what is called a crown that you can wear on your head or other part of your body. This wearable tech is like the most personal of personal assistants. It can call a cab for you or order dinner but it also can tell when you are stressed or worried and can help sooth and calm you. It can diagnose illness, automatically look up words you don’t know, and perform a whole host of other tasks for you. People have become so reliant on them for so many things that they can no longer do without them.

So when the word flu strikes it happens fast and spreads like wildfire. The word flu is a computer virus that was somehow combined with human DNA and so can infect people through their Memes as well as person-to-person. It begins with actual flu symptoms, headache, fever, fatigue, but then people begin to exhibit aphasia — they start substituting nonsense words for real words but they don’t know they are doing this. Word flu, it turns out, can be mild as well as fatal. Treatment comes in the form of antivirals, a language fast, reading print books, writing with a pen and paper, and having conversations with uninfected people.

The story that takes place before and during this outbreak that begins in the United States and eventually spreads worldwide, centers on Anana Johnson, a twenty-something talented visual artist who makes a living working for her father, Doug Johnson. Doug is a lexicographer and in charge of the North American Dictionary of the English Language. They are less than a week away from publishing the third edition, a huge multivolume work that is sort of like the OED of American English. It and the OED are the last dictionaries to actually be independently owned and published. All other dictionaries have sold out to the makers of the Meme.

When Doug suddenly goes missing Anana, also called Alice (as in Wonderland), sets out to try and find him. But the word flu outbreak begins about the same time and so many strange things are going on — there is a secret society, a Creatorium where fake words are created, words disappearing from the dictionary — not to mention that Anana gets the flu. But Doug, in a moment of prescience, had forced two bottles of antivirals upon her a week before he disappeared. She is also lucky that she only gets a mild case.

It is a fun book that I think a good many avid readers will enjoy. There are lots of bits about words and language:

Words, I’ve come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we’re history’s orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased.

And:

Words are living legends, swollen with significance. We string them together to make stories, but they themselves are stories, encapsulating rich, runny histories.

Of course, as you might expect, the book is sprinkled with $10 vocabulary words like cimicine as in “the building’s ill-lit, cimicine basement.” I admit I looked it up online, because I couldn’t be bothered to get up and check my giant American Heritage Dictionary, a dictionary I love but hardly ever use because, well, I have to get up and go to it and there is usually a computer or iPad close to hand that is so much more convenient. If a word flu ever really does strike, I am obviously going to be doomed for no other reason than laziness.

The book’s structure is also part of the entertainment. Each chapter is a letter for the alphabet and goes from A to Z with a word and definition at the beginning of each. The book is also broken up into three sections, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And with each of those sections the part of the story works exactly as the section title suggests.

Besides the structure there are a lot of Alice in Wonderland references. the book even has as an epigraph of the exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

There are also many references to Samuel Johnson and his dictionary. And there is philosophizing with Hegel that made me interested in reading Hegel, which was a surprise given how painful the experience was in college. But it sounded so interesting and, my brain tries hard to convince me, maybe this time it will be different since there is no paper or grade or know-it-all classmate to make me feel dumb as a rock. Yeah, I know, we’ll see if Hegel happens or whether I conveniently just don’t have the time.

The Word Exchange is a quick fun debut novel. It is part conspiracy theory, part thriller, part mystery, part science fiction, and part warning. A little something for almost everyone.

Any Smithsonian Magazine readers out there? The May issue caught my eye because it has Patrick Stewart on the cover. The man is 73 but he is still as hunky as ever (his wife is only 35!). Much as I’d love to ramble on about him, I’m going to move on to an article of interest in the magazine on science fiction. No, it’s not Star Trek or X-Men but it could be!

The article is How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors are Shaping Your Future by Eileen Gunn. We often think of science fiction in terms of whether or not the view of the future comes true. I have found myself saying more than once, where’s my flying car? This is unfair, of course. As Gunn suggests,

the task of science fiction is not to predict the future. Rather, it contemplates possible futures.

Some writers like Ursula Le Guin like future settings because it is a big question mark making it a safe place to try out ideas. Others like to envision where contemporary social trends or science and technology might take us. Sometimes you get happy futures but these days more often than not you get dystopian futures with ideas, social structures or technology taken to extremes. Think Margaret Atwood with biotech and genetic engineering or Suzanne Collins taking the gap between rich and poor to the extreme in Hunger Games.

But does science pay attention to science fiction? Yes, it does. Astrophysicist Jordin Kare went to MIT because the hero of his favorite Robert Heinlein novel went to school there. And last fall two MIT instructors taught a class called “Science Fiction to Science Fabrication” that had a syllabus crammed with scifi novels and stories, movies and games. Students were assigned to create a functional prototype inspired by their reading and then consider the social context of what they created. One group of students, inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, built a device that enables the user to make a hand gesture that stimulates the muscles in the hand of a distant second user to create the same gesture. The students thought it would be great for use in physical therapy but there was also a big discussion around how the technology might be exploited for unethical purposes as it was in Gibson’s novel.

Then there is design fiction, something I have never heard of before but which makes complete sense. Tech companies commission imaginative works to model new ideas and create what-if stories about potential new products. Novelists the likes of Cory Doctorow have written these sorts of “science fictions.”

We might not have flying cars but we have plenty of other technologies thanks to the imaginations of science fiction writers and the skills of scientists. While the design fiction kind of creeps me out a little bit (I’m not sure why), I am heartened to know that there are plenty of scientists who love and are inspired by scifi. As the article concludes:

Science fiction, at its best, engenders the sort of flexible thinking that not only inspires us, but compels us to consider the myriad potential consequences of our actions.

My Kindle counter said I was only 91% of the way through George R.R. Martin’s Feast for Crows so I was very surprised while waiting for my bus to arrive at the train station and take me home this afternoon to click the next page button and discover I had finished the book. What? Turns out the rest of the book is made up of appendices, a who’s who of characters, relationships and houses. Well that was unexpected. Good thing I have plenty of other books on my Kindle and I already knew what one to read next.

Feast for Crows is the fourth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. Is it bad of me to say I did not like it as much as the first three? Martin does a great job of continuing to develop characters and letting them change and grow or, in the case of some of them, dig their own graves. And the religious conflicts in the book between three different religions is really fascinating and well done. I also liked that most of the focus in this book is on female characters.

But the book ends in an arbitrary place with cliffhangers galore and no promise that they will be resolved in the next book. Because the next book focuses on the characters that were left out of this book. Martin found he was writing too much and so spilt what was the fourth book into two books, deciding to also split the stories of the characters. At the moment I don’t like that decision. I might change my mind after I read the fifth book. For now though it has left me with an unsatisfied feeling mixed with a little grumpiness.

Yes, I am watching the TV show of Game of Thrones that is currently airing. I started reading the series before the show began and had my own idea of what the characters looked like and all that. Now when I am reading I can’t remember my conception of them and instead have the TV characters’ images stuck in my head. Also, it is difficult to reconcile the way the book tells the story with how the show does. Some things stick closely to the book and others leave me gawping and muttering wtf? It’s always a risk one takes with books to screen.

I’ll be taking a break for a few months before I read A Dance with Dragons. And maybe by then Martin will have finished the sixth book and I can tie up the ends of all these dangling threads book four has left.