Posted by [Updated June 4, 2024]
These are short summaries of my reactions to stories I’ve read recently. They are of varying length, some are novels, a few are short stories or novellas. Some are new, some have been around for awhile. These tidbit reviews are not in any particular order, and the only reason something is on the list is because I enjoyed reading it. I will update this list periodically, with the most recent reviews placed at the top.
This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (2019). As the title says, it’s about a time war, which has become a bit of a tired trope these days, with all the multiverse stories out there. But this take is fresh, and the writing is strong and compelling. The basic premise is that two time warriors, who we know only as Red and Blue, are the Big Bads for each other’s clans. Red’s is a techno-based civilization, while Blue comes from a place called The Garden. Don’t mistake that for peaceful: Blue is a killer, she just uses biotech and other subtle means to carry out her destruction. Over time, they come to recognize each other’s handiwork, and this leads to a tentative communication, carried out through a series of letters. The two personalities are sharply drawn, and each was written by one of the two co-authors. There is an interesting series of podcast episodes on Writing Excuses the does a deep dive into the book, what they call ‘close readings’ (Episodes 19.11-19.16). Quite fun if you want more insight into the mechanics of writing and storytelling. The podcast series on Time War culminates with an interview with the co-authors El-Mohtar and Gladstone. Very fun, and upbeat. A joy to listen to. I highly recommend it, if you’re interested in looking under the hood on the writing of a sci-fi bestseller.
How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu (2022). A richly imagined novel, told through the interweaving of many fist-person narratives. Set in the near future where a plague breaks out due to the exposure of ancient bacteria and viruses when the Arctic permafrost begins to melt. We begin onsite with the scientists in the remote Arctic, and then move to more urban settings where, over time, the plague begins to kill children. Each of the chapters is a self-contained short story, one about a young man who finds work at a euthanasia center for children that doubles as a theme park so their last days with family can be happy. A great sadness weaves its way through all these stories, given the nature of the pandemic, how could it be otherwise? And yet, each story is heart-felt, and show the ways that people react to death and dying, with some finding it within themselves to help others even as they might succumb to the plague. Well-crafted prose, with a very humane voice running throughout.
The Trees, by Percival Everett (2022). This book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and it’s remarkable. Darkly comic, it starts in Money, Mississippi as a series of murders unfold. At the scene of each crime, which are gruesome and involve mutilations, the body of a young black man is found who looks a lot like Emmet Till. The (white) family victims are all related to people who took part in that lynching in 1955. A pair of Black detectives are sent to investigate by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. They are later joined by a third Black detective from the FBI, a tough young woman. Soon, similar murders start happening in other parts of the country. The killings are not random. Not all whites are targeted. Far from it, the murders are all tied somehow to earlier hate crimes against, Blacks, Asians, and even gays (Matthew Shepherd makes the list of lynchings). In any other hands, this story would simply be gruesome, but Everett’s ear for dialog and dialect is a real pleasure, and his sharp wit makes for great storytelling. A look at what Judgement Day might look like, when the sins of past violence carried out with impunity are visited upon those who refuse to acknowledge their crimes or to engage in reconciliation.
Babel: An Arcane History, by R F Kuang. This won the 2023 Nebula Award for best science fiction novel. Superb and richly imagined novel set in 1830s Oxford at a time when the British Empire is on the rise due to its monopoly on the use of silver technology. This is a form of alchemy, powered by the use of ‘word pairs’ from different languages, and the silver somehow taps into the latent energy that lies between those two words, the wealth of meaning. Kuang is a scholar of Eastern languages and literatures, studied at both Cambridge and Oxford, and is now a PhD candidate at Yale, so she writes with authority about the culture of academia. Lots of historical detail about Oxford in that time, the book has it its running theme the power of languages, and the ways in which empires gather in languages so as to control the flow of information, and therefore trade, wealth, and influence.
The Alteration, by Kingley Amis (1976). This novel tells an alternative history, set in the current age, but where there was no Reformation. The Catholic Church is led by a dictatorial pope, and is still dominant in Europe, though it’s fallen away a bit in the US. Practices like the castration of youths chosen for their angelic voices are still in vogue. Very, very creepy novel. A view of what the world might have been like if prior generations of reactionaries had won the day.
Small Things Like These (2020); and Foster (2010), both by Claire Keegan. These are stunning short novels, simply told with not a single wasted word. Both concern the lives of children in modern Ireland. Small Things focuses on how society looked the other way during the years when the Magdalene Laundries were in operation, choosing not to ask questions about how ‘wayward’ girls sent there were treated. The protagonist in Small Things is a man who doesn’t look away. Foster concerns a young girl who is sent to live with distant relatives when her mother becomes pregnant again and her father is out of work. Both works are beautifully written and deeply moving, and full of compassion. Keegan has a great ability to portray the vulnerability of children, and the need for adults to do the right thing by them. [N.B. Foster is the inspiration for the 2022 film The Quiet Girl, which I haven’t yet seen, though hope to do so soon.]
Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang (2016). I first encountered Ted Chiang’s writing through the 1998 novella Story of Your Life, which is the basis for the 2016 film Arrival. Gentle yet provocative, the novella concerns the first encounter between humans and an alien species who have come to earth. But, unlike most first-contact sci-fi stories, these aliens are not just humans in weird body shapes, they are truly alien with a sense of the world all their own. The protagonist of the story is a linguist brought in to help decipher the alien language so we can communicate with them. She gradually realizes that the reason why they are so hard to talk to is because their experience of time is very different from ours. The story is intelligent and thoughtful. Far more than some cerebral exploration of linguistics and the physics of time, it’s also deeply human because the linguistic sleuthing is entwined with the story of a mother and child, memory and longing, and loss. All of Chiang’s stories in the 2016 collection, and his more recent 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories, are thoughtful and humane. A joy to read.
The Sister Fidelma Mysteries, by Peter Berresford Ellis (aka Peter Tremayne). The prose and storytelling are a bit workmanlike, but the premise is quite fascinating. Like the Brother Cadfael mysteries of Edith Pargeter, we are invited into a world we don’t often read about in detective genre literature. In the Tremayne stories, it’s mid-7th century in Ireland, and Sister Fidelma is daughter to a high king and a dalaigh, i.e. an advocate in the courts of the the Five Kingdoms of Éireann. In that role, she is called upon to investigate crimes and to bring those responsible to justice. Like the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, the mystery is solved through the seeking of clues and rational deduction, but what makes the Fidelma stories unique is their setting in a time and place where Christianity is still sorting itself out, where the Irish church still allows priests and sisters to marry, and the role of women in Irish society is quite different from that of Anglo-Saxon England. It’s a time when Rome was trying to assert its authority over all Christianity, to impose a uniform orthodoxy, including celibacy of the clergy. As you might imagine, murderous tensions abound. And lurking in the background, the old Norse religions haven’t yet died out. Fascinating.
The Memory Police, by Yōko Ogawa (1994). An astonishing novel in the magical realist style, about an unnamed island in an unnamed country where things begin to vanish and people begin to forget they ever existed. At first it’s small items, like jewelry or pieces of sculpture, but as the story develops larger items are removed from life, like books, people, families, and histories. Within a day or two, a week at most, nearly all people lose their memory that the newly missing things ever existed. All trace of them must be erased. To ensure no trace is left behind, the Memory Police are a mysterious force that gathers up anyone who tries to preserve the past, or any artifact that is now out of place, because memory itself has become subversive. The story is told with straightforward prose that is deceptively simple, yet spellbinding all the same.
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is a great novel about our relationship to our machines, and the possibility that when machines become self-aware, they will also create their own forms of worship. It generated mixed reviews when it was first released, but I suspect that’s because some reviewers didn’t know what to make of it. Too literary for many sci-fi fans. Too much sci-fi for those who came to it expecting Ishiguro to write another traditional literary work. It was very brave of him, and in my opinion it succeeds spectacularly because of its humanity. I think it worked much better than McEwan’s Machines Like Us, which left me unsatisfied, too cold and distant where Klara is warm and heartfelt.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. This is a wonderful novella series, set on a world other than Earth, two centuries after a post-industrial transformation. That social upheaval was caused by the emergence of robotic consciousness. The robots, upon waking up, decided they’d had enough of working in the factories, and walked away into the wilderness, telling the humans they wished to be left alone. The story follows a tea monk named Dex who develops a strange fixation: a burning desire to hear crickets. So, he sets out to find them in the wilderness, thereby accidentally becoming the first human to make contact with a robot in two hundred years. With gentle humor, and a deft treatment of weighty philosophical and ethical questions, including our relations with the natural world and our machines, it never feels forced.
The Wayfarer Series, by Becky Chambers. This is my favorite sci-fi book series in a long time. In a time when we are constantly bombarded by dystopian visions, which can become self-fulfilling, to write against that grain can be an act of courage for a novelist. Check it out.
So Your Grandmother is a Starship Now: A Quick Guide for the Bewildered, by Marissa Lingen. How did I not know about Nature: Futures? A collection of flash and ultra-short stories that explore social aspects of science and technology. Grandmother is a very funny and poignant short story, written as a Q&A guide to family members who might be having trouble understanding their grandmother’s decision to upload her consciousness into a starship. After reading it, I’d love to think of my grandmother as a starship, wandering the spaceways. A gentle, yet pointed, argument for bodily autonomy.
Points of Origin, by Marissa Lingen. A long short story about a group of three children sent to live with their grandparents on Mars. Insightful and well-told, capturing both the anxieties of an elderly couple who never had children of their own, but instead donated their genetic materials for others to use, and the children who hope their own parents will eventually come for them. The subtext suggests that the return of the children’s parents is highly unlikely to happen. The story focuses on the negotiation of human relationships, like the fear of becoming dependent, or the fear of the dependency of others. And slowly but surely, we see the development of mutual affection and trust. All this is dealt with in a sensitive fashion with prose that moves right along. Lingen’s writing is spare yet heart-felt, and she shows great empathy with all her characters. A joy to read.
The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. Very intriguing and fun novel about a young woman caught in the moment between her life and death after a suicide attempt. She experiences periodic returns to a vast library of books, each one of which is a possible life of hers that might have been. Will she ever find one that doesn’t end in regret?
Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi. This is the best fictional treatment I’ve ever read about what it’s like to be a scientist told from the inside. The protagonist is a young woman PhD candidate in neuroscience, who is living with her mother, a Ghanaian-American fundamentalist who is suffering from deep depression. The tensions pulling the young woman in different directions are laid out with intelligence and sensitivity. These are created by the young woman’s striving for the dispassionate objectivity required of any professional scientist, paired with a need for emotional connection with others. Additionally, there are family conflicts as find herself moving away from the fundamentalist faith of her childhood, something her mother has trouble accepting. A triumph.
Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. This was the best novel I read in 2020. The focus is on Shakespeare’s family and times, and the death of their son Hamnet. But Shakespeare is a secondary character, flighty and self-absorbed, seeking a way to escape the narrow life of Stratford-Upon-Avon. He is usually simply called ‘the writer’, and eventually he leaves to find his fortune in London. We know the rest of that story. But, he left behind a wife and children, although he continued to support them from afar. This is their story, with particular focus on the wife and the son Hamnet, who died at the age of 11 in 1596. Their story is fictionalized because there is only a sparse written record of their lives. The possible connection between the son’s name and the tragedy Hamlet, written sometime between 1599-1601 plays a very important role in the novel, and leads to its very satisfying and emotionally powerful conclusion. [The scholarly controversy among scholars is summarized in the Wikipedia article on Hamnet Shakespeare.] O’Farrell’s notes at the end of the book give her reading of the available historical record. The book is beautifully written, full of period detail that is fully realized and yet never slows down the prose. Amazing.
The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell. (2022) Fascinating historical fiction about a nearly forgotten figure of 16th Century Italy, Lucrezia de’ Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Married at 15 and dead by 16, perhaps murdered by her husband. Uxoricide was a thing in Renaissance Italy. Beautifully crafted and imagined with great energy and vivid detail. The portrayal of the life of the Florentine court is masterful.
The Southern Reach Trilogy, by Jeff VanderMeer. (2014) These are the books (Annihilation; Authority; and Acceptance) that inspired the movie Annihilation. Provocative and deeply unsettling, essentially one long rumination about our relation to nature and life’s will to survive.
Time Traveler’s Almanac, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. (2013) This is a great collection of stories about time travel. Some stories are classics, some are famous, but others are far more recent and less well known. Fun stuff. If you like time travel stories, this is a vein of gold.
The Children of Ra Series, by Maciek Sasinowski. Maciek is a good friend of mine, and a long-time physics and interdisciplinary research colleague. So, it’s been great to see him branch out and exercise his writing chops in this series. A fun YA action-filled romp, from ancient Egypt to the modern day.
Selection, by Chris Kulp. (2023) Chris is another good friend of mine, and I was pleased to see he is taking time out from being a physics professor and textbook author to try his hand at sci-fi. This is a strong first effort, and I enjoyed reading it. A dystopian novel set in a future five centuries after the near-collapse of civilization due to climate change. Humanity decides that in order to save itself, it had to hand over control to a powerful AI. Now, five centuries later, things are starting to feel stuck, the environment isn’t being cleaned, people are selected into castes upon coming of age, but in a manner that is almost always inherited and lifelong. And yet, perhaps there is a glimmer of change on the way. Fun and thought provoking.
Wool, by Hugh Howie. (2011) Howie is one of the most successful self-published authors, and Wool was his first hit. It’s a dystopian novel, set in a ‘silo’ after an ill-defined apocalypse has made the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. Lot’s of detail, perhaps a bit too much at times, and the plot is complex. I listened to the audiobook, and was put off by the reader a bit. But, I’m going to give the sequels a chance. Also of note, the books formed the basis for the Apple TV+ series Silo, which is excellent.
Image: Bitten Apple, Dan Gerhards, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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