The heat-sensitive black bars on my banned books mug no longer change colour, so all the titles remain visible no matter what. All the books are unbanned.
I’m OK with this. I hope one day the rest of the world is, too.
Unbanned
Books
Review: The Strange
A Facebook friend of mine recommended The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud. My local library was able to get a copy via interlibrary loan, and I picked it up on Friday. Last night—Monday—I finished reading it.
It starts off a bit like True Grit[1]I’ve only seen the Coens’ version of the movie, but I’ve heard it hews pretty close to the Charles Portis novel. One day I’ll have to read it.—a rough-around-the-edges life in a frontier town, narrated by a thirteen-year-old girl. But it’s set on Mars. In 1931.
Continue reading “Review: The Strange”Footnotes
| ↑1 | I’ve only seen the Coens’ version of the movie, but I’ve heard it hews pretty close to the Charles Portis novel. One day I’ll have to read it. |
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Review: Project Hail Mary
A man wakes up alone and can’t remember, well, pretty much anything. A computer asks him “What’s two plus two?” When he finally answers “four”, it asks him his name. But that’s gone.
It comes back to him before long, of course. Slowly, slowly, through flashbacks to his previous life, we find out who he is, what he does, and why he’s all alone on a starship that’s somehow arrived at Tau Ceti, thirteen light-years from Earth.
As it turns out, he—his name is Ryland Grace, which isn’t really a spoiler, since it’s in the book-flap synopsis—was one of the people who discovered a threat to our sun that could spell the end of all life on Earth. He’s been sent on a one-way mission to try to find a solution.
And, well, he’s not really alone. There aren’t any other humans alive on his ship, but… there’s more than one race afflicted with the solar problem.
Continue reading “Review: Project Hail Mary”Review: The River Has Roots
Page-count–wise, there’s not a lot to this novella by Amal El-Mohtar. The story isn’t quite a hundred pages, and some of those are full-page illustrations.
Story-wise, there’s plenty: sisterly devotion, unrequited love, racism[1]Or is it speciesism if it’s human versus fae?, shapeshifting, witchcraft, baking. Truth, lies, and consequences. Willows. Grammar.
Esther and Ysabel live near the edge of Faerie, where the river Liss runs between two giant willows called the Professors. Esther is courted by a local farmer, but her heart has been captured by a person from the other side of the line, an inhabitant of Faerie. This little love triangle[2]Possibly a rhombus by the time the dust settles. has far-reaching consequences.
Continue reading “Review: The River Has Roots”Review: The Wrong Stars
Captain Callie and her band of merry[1]To a first approximation. misfits[2]To a first approximation. aboard the spaceship White Raven stumble onto a derelict starship in the frontier wilds out past Neptune. It’s a starship that can’t possibly be there: the Anjou was launched centuries ago, in an at-the-time last-gasp attempt at colonizing extrasolar systems. The Anjou should be light-years away, possibly even orbiting a newly-colonized world. Yet, here it is.
On board the derelict they find one surviving crew member, Elena, asleep in a cryogenic bed. They wake her up and she tells them a tale of first contact with a weird alien race.
But Callie and the rest of the crew already know about aliens; the Liars have lived among them for a long time now. However, it seems Elena’s aliens are different, and much, much more dangerous[3]Probably.
There’s a lot going on in this book, the first of a trilogy (plus a book of short stories) about the human race’s encounter(s) with alien menace(s). I found much to enjoy, though I almost quit reading a couple times. Let’s cover the good stuff first: There’s no shortage of action here, and it’s set in a future that’s been knocked around a bit. Details about the world we’re in—physical, political, and personal—are handed out as needed, and they all fit together pretty nicely. Several plot twists upend everything we understand about the world, but nothing nullifies what came before, only casts it in a new light.
On the down side: there’s a long-running thread of “will they or won’t they” running through the first half of the book, and its handling felt clumsy, full of false starts and hokey misunderstandings like a forgettable C‑list rom-com. There are a few details, mostly about characters, where the author withholds information for seemingly no other reason than to have a “shocking revelation” moment. It reminded me of a specific type of person: the kind who has a secret and will never tell you, but desperately wants you to know that they know something you don’t.
Once the rom-com got resolved, everything else seemed to fall into place. Everything accelerated. An awful lot of plot happened in the last third of the book; even the last chapter was a breathless ride into enemy territory. There wasn’t really time even to breathe, it seemed.
All that said, I’m glad I finished reading, and I’m planning to read the other two books. (And possibly the short stories, too.)
If I was the type to assign grades, this one would get about 6.5 / 10.
The Wrong Stars, 2018, by Tim Pratt. First in the Axiom series.
(Point of trivia: I think this might be the first book I’ve read based on a recommendation from a Bluesky post[4]It’s entirely possible I’m wrong, of course..)
Book review: Absolution
About 10 years ago I checked Jeff Vandermeer’s novel Annihilation out of my local library. It was a short, weird story about the twelfth[1]Well, depending how you count, as it turns out. expedition into a deeply weird place called Area X.
Area X is a section of Florida, the Forgotten Coast, where something has changed. Lifeforms are modified, sometimes merged, sometimes wholly remade; ghosts and doppelgängers appear, both in Area X and back in the normal world; time seems to move in different ways once you’ve crossed the border. There’s a tower that descends into the ground[2]Where lies the strangling fruit… and a lighthouse that I’m not sure anyone wants to go near. Annihilation was a dreamlike experience, with the caveat that nightmares are also dreams.
Having read the first book, I read the sequels too: Authority is the story of a man code-named Control, who is sent from Central to the Southern Reach—the shadowy government entity that supervises explorations of Area X—to try to get the place back under, well, control. It’s a spy thriller with a soupçon of body horror and weird, in its own way, as Annihilation. The third book, Acceptance, merges and extends the first two: Control is now inside Area X, with someone who might or might not be the biologist whose POV dominated Annihilation, while other chapters give us some insight into the formation of Area X.
Now, ten years later, Vandermeer has written a fourth novel in the series, a prequel and capstone: Absolution. And it’s good.
It’s essentially three novellas, interwoven together[3]Not unlike Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus.. The first one is an exploration of the Forgotten Coast, twenty years before Area X formed, filtered through a one-time Central operative named Old Jim as he reads decades-old reports. Part two, eighteen months before the border comes down, has Old Jim in the field, now with a young partner posing as his estranged daughter, working as a dive-bar manager and digging deeper into the interlocking weirdnesses happening on the Forgotten Coast. The third section is the story of the very first[4]Well, apart from the chicken. expedition to Area X, from the point of view of Lowry, who eventually becomes the director of the Southern Reach.
Absolution is a wild ride through a burgeoning apocalypse, and it carries the same sense of dread I got from the extant trilogy: This will not end well. There are numerous callbacks to the first three books, and while some mysteries might end up resolved, plenty more question are raised than are answered. A great many questions may well be unanswerable.
If you’re looking for everything to be neatly tied up at the end, this isn’t the book for you, isn’t the series for you. If you’re looking for a spy thriller, an existential threat to the human race, a bunch of body horror, and a stunning number of F‑bombs[5]There were more fucks in the table of contents than in some novels., you’ll probably enjoy this one. (You’ll probably want to read the first three books first, though.)
I look forward to re-reading the whole saga in a few years.
Review: My Real Children
It’s 2015. Patricia Cowan is in a care home. The chart at the end of her bed reads “Confused today.” Sometimes it reads “Very confused.” She’s not entirely sure if the washroom is to the left or to the right.
She remembers two lives. In one she married a man, had four children and five miscarriages, and lived a life of quiet desperation. In the other she lived with a woman, with whom she shared three children children, and wrote travel guides to Florence and other Italian cities. There are cities on the moon, or maybe they’re just weapon platforms.
Which life was real? Where did they diverge?
Well, you’ll need to read Jo Walton’s novel My Real Children to know for sure. It’s a look at two lives, four generations, alternate geopolitics, the Renaissance, and all the lives we touch whether we mean to or not.
(I lied, a little, when I said it’s about two lives. Honestly, it’s about dozens and dozens of lives touched by Patricia, not just her two lives.)
You’ll find happiness and sorrow throughout, both at the personal scale and the grand. This is my second foray into the work of Jo Walton, after the Just City trilogy, and she does not flinch from showing you the tragedy of life. But she’ll show you the joy, too.
Library haul, April 2024
My local library had neither one of these books in the stacks. Enter ILL!
I bet I could probably get Gene Wolfe’s final novel, Interlibrary Loan, via ILL…
The Just City
This line in Jo Walton’s The Just City struck me hard, and so I share it with you.
“There isn’t an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.”
Apollo, in The Just City by Jo Walton
The Land Across
There’s a lot going on. But then there’s always a lot going on in a Gene Wolfe book.
This was my first read of The Land Across, and it’s going to require additional read-throughs for me to pick up on some of the puzzles. But even on a surface level, this book is very “all things to all people”.
Grafton, an American travel writer[1]Well, that’s what he claims to be, and why wouldn’t we believe him?, travels to an unnamed country in Eastern Europe, the land across the mountains, intending to write the first travel book about the nation. Very quickly he becomes entangled in the local law, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and a conspiracy that grows to include a haunted house, at least one love triangle, a buried treasure, and a Satanic cult. Strange figures come and go[2]For example: was that Dracula?, seemingly at random. Some of the ghostly events turn out to have mundane explanations; others are in fact ghosts.
To quote one of the police officers in the first chapter:
“All maps are wrong. If the [enemies] come, they will be lost.”
—Gene Wolfe, The Land Across
I’ve found a couple reviews of this novel from 2013, when it was published: Charlie Jane Anders wrote about it for io9, and Mordicai Knode’s review for Tor.com suggests further reading—for instance, Flann O’Connor’s The Third Policeman.
I’ve also found this guide, full of spoilers, which I plan to use when I get to my second read of the novel. (This note is mostly for me, but if it helps you out too, I’m glad.)